No Grannies in Africa

Who will protect the little girls of Africa?

Shortly after Christmas, I became a father – or rather, I nearly became one. I do not know how to put it exactly. I did not know I was old enough to be a teenage girl’s father. She must be sixteen, or maybe fourteen. I could not really tell. I had never met her before.

I spent Christmas holed up in my little office, behind the laptop, sometimes putting finishing touches on my first feature film, The Felistas Fable, other times rewriting my first romance novella, which will hopefully come out later this year. I was feeling bad about myself that I had made a feature film before publishing a book, and that the first book I’d ever publish is a romance. Or rather the publisher thinks it’s a romance and I was not seeing it like that at all. Anyway, being holed up with two big works on the desk meant I had not shaved for a long time. Maybe I thought was Father Christmas and so had to grow a really long and unkempt beard, and maybe that beard made this girl think I could be her father.

I was on my way to the saloon, but I stopped by this little shop where I always buy petty stuff to get airtime. I found the girl sitting on the bench, her face stained with tears. I asked her what the problem was, but she ignored me. So I turned to the shopkeeper, a lady we all call Nalongo, though I’ve never seen her twins. I do not even think she has a husband, but a few children are always running around her shop. Maybe she divorced the father and the twins are with him. I’ve never really found out.

“Did you beat this young girl?” I asked her.


Youth in Moroto doing the courtship dance at school. Does such increase teenage sexual activities?

“No,” she replied. “She only wants a soda. It is Christmas and she hasn’t tasted any soda. You know how children are during Christmas.”

“Ah,” was all I managed to say, as I passed over the money and got the air time cards. I glanced at the girl, the way you glance at a person who you’ve just been told has a few lose wires in the head, and I saw the fury in her eyes. Why is she angry with me, I thought, yet it is Nalongo who made the joke?

“I’m not a child,” she hissed, still glaring at me. “And I don’t want a soda.”

Girls Education Movement Club in Kitgum perform a drama
in support of pregnant girls who return to school.

Tears rolled down her face, revealing the great volume of emotions that

A character in the film The Young Ones Who Won't Stay Behind.
She walked miles everyday to get to school, proving the point
that no matter a child's character, they love school.

were pent up inside her. I could not stand it. So I simply nodded and begun to walk away. But hardly had I taken a few steps than she said, “Wait.”

I waited. She said something to Nalongo that I did not get, for she whispered. They talked amidst themselves for a few seconds, and I stood there sheepishly, not knowing what to do. Finally, Nalongo turned to me and asked, “Where are you going?”

“To shave.”

“Don’t shave. Just for a few days. You look better with your hair like that.” I did not want to look
into the mirror for I was afraid of the animal I would see. I know this Pinoy girl would be pissed off to see me with such a wild crop of mousy hair on my head, and with such scraggy beards on my chin that I might have been a monkey (Do monkey’s have beards? Maybe not. Maybe a goat.) So whatever she said, I was resolved to get a shave. “We need your help.”

“You do?”

“Please be my father?” This came from the girl, and it was so outrageous that I giggled (like a teenage girl).

I could be Father Christmas, I thought, since the beards were long. But clearly, the way the girl looked at me she was not thinking of Father Christmas. Nalongo came over to me and whispered the situation. The girl was pregnant. A teacher – her ex teacher from Mukono High School – was responsible. She did not want to abort. She wanted to make the teacher pay a large sum of money that would not only cater for her medical and pregnancy needs, but also pay for a course in beauty and hairdressing. The part I was to play was simple. Pretend to be her father. Scream at the teacher and threaten to throw him into jail unless he parted with three million shillings.

But I did not want to play that part. I’m not the screaming type. I’m not the belligerent type. I am not able to intimidate a fly, anyone who meets me for half a minute will be able to figure that out. I could not do what this girl and Nalongo were asking me. “Why don’t you just go to the police and arrest the man? That way, he will pay ten million if you ask for it.”

But she could not go to the police for it would involve her real parents. Then, she would not see even a shilling of the money the teacher paid. Her parents and the police would distribute it amongst themselves, the teacher would go scot free, and she would be left to suffer with the baby for the rest of her life. The best way out for her was if this teacher put the money in her hands. That way, she could be sure of making a life for herself. Apparently, her father refused to pay for her education after he found her naked with a boyfriend in the bathroom. (Her father refused to listen to her excuse, “We were only playing.”) She had developed a reputation as a loose girl, so her father did not see the point in educating a prostitute. She did strike me as the typical rebellious teenager who thinks it is cool to drink, smoke weed and go night clubbing in Gabana and Satellite Beach Mukono. I did not know why I should ever get involved with such a character. I did not even know her names.

Please Daddy don't get angry. We were just playing

“Please,” Nalongo said. “Help the girl. I know you don’t know her, but I was once her neighbor in Bajo. That is where she stays. She calls me aunt. She is a good girl and I want her to overcome this situation. After her parents see that she is putting herself through beauty school, they might tolerate the pregnancy, but if they know about it right now they might kill her.”

I looked at the girl again, expecting to see a bulge in her tummy, but I did not see anything. No sign to show that she was pregnant. I wrestled with the decision. I often think of myself as a social activist. It’s the first line I write whenever I’m sending out a grant application for my documentary films. I describe myself as a filmmaker and social activist. So what was I going to do about this little girl?

My storytelling instincts took over. Maybe I could make a documentary about her, a film about defilement and horrible teachers who prey on their students, about ‘swaggerific’ teenagers and parents who have no clue how to handle them, who think stopping to pay their school fees is the only way to discipline a child. I could see a whole big issue there to work with, but I had to be certain of the facts. Was she really pregnant, and was this teacher really responsible?

“I’ve been vomiting every morning for three days,” she said. “I missed my periods. This teacher is the only person I’ve slept with in the last six months.” She paused, then added. “Without a condom.”

“Oh,” I said. It kind of made sense. I was going to suggest that she actually takes a pregnancy test, but somehow the words did not come out. All I could think about was that she had slept with other boys (how many?) using condoms, and I remember the old saying that condoms are not really perfect. So it might not be the teacher. What kind of film then would I make?

“He told me he could put my name on the USE list,” she went on, unprompted, and tears were rolling down her face afresh. USE. Universal Secondary Education. A government program to provide free education. If she got her name in, she could continue going to school even if her parents no longer paid her fees. “I agreed to sleep with him. I have never slept with an old person before but I wanted to at least finish A Level.”

Will a documentary I make keep the smiles on their faces?

Of course with the baby coming, she could no longer pursue this dream. She had to drop out. Being wise, she of a skill to support herself - thus beauty school.
As I watched the tears roll down her cheeks, a selfish part of my brain wished I had a camera to preserve the moment. Unfortunately, that is how my silly brain works these days. I can only think in terms of capturing everything on camera. Instead of comforting the girl, I was thinking of how lovely a scene it would be in a film. Cinéma vérité. Pure and unadulterated documentary. But such moments never find you with a camera.

It struck me how pathetic I was. For though I convinced myself that I wanted to make a social action film, a small voice whispered that all I was doing was take advantage of a little girl in her misery, the way the teacher had used her in her desire to continue studying. And the voice urged me to help her without any ulterior motives.

“Okay,” I told Nalongo. “What do you want me to do?”

Ha, what happened after that is a really long story, and I think it’s best if I continued it in the next post. Right now, I have to finish this romance novella – the second one I’m writing in two months! – so pleasecome back to hear what happened to the girl. Maybe, at the end of the year, you will be seeing a documentary film about her.

PS: The follow up article is here http://www.dilmandila.com/2013/02/the-troubled-children-of-uganda.html

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Street children begging in Kampala.
Broken family values is largely responsible for this.

To continue the story of the pregnant girl and the monster teacher (read it here), I agreed to be her father. She wanted to make money out of a man who had impregnated her, and she wanted me to pretend being her father. She was only fourteen years old, and I battled with my conscience over what I was doing. But I was thinking of a documentary film about the troubled children of Uganda today, about parents who fail to handle rebellious teenagers, about the breakdown of family values, which has left children at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

I thought being this girl’s father would give me an opportunity to use the cinéma vérité technique, I being part of the story, giving the audience a candid ‘insiders’ view of the happenings. It was a scoop. A pregnant teenager. A monster teacher who preys on his students. But before I could proceed, I had to verify the pregnancy, so I suggested a test.

“What for?” the girl said. “He did me without a condom. I’m vomiting every morning. I have missed my periods. Why then should I take a test? If you don’t want to be part of the deal just tell us.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Nalongo, who got me involved in this whole saga, and who would pretend to be her mother, said. “He is right. You need to take a test to be absolutely certain.”

Tales are rife of women who pretend to be pregnant just to get the man to marry them. It had crossed my mind that this girl might just be putting up a show in order to grab money from this teacher. I did not want to be part of such a scheme. I had to be absolutely certain she was pregnant. The girl did not argue much. She agreed to take a test. I thought it would be nice to film her as she went to the pharmacy to get a testing kit, to capture the tests and her reaction to the results on video, so I ran back home and picked up my camera, but she was not impressed.

“Do you want to put me on agataliko nfuufu?” This is a news program that relies on community reporting. They do not use any professional journalists. Anyone anywhere with a camera, even if it is on a mobile phone, can shoot anything amusing and submit it. They thus feature very absurd but entertaining stories. It put a fear on the common people, for whenever they see a camera they at once think someone is trying to make news for agataliko nfuufu.

I tried to explain my purpose to this little girl – child rights, broken family values, monster teachers, the great divide between parents and teenagers – but she could not comprehend anything. It struck me that the best place to tell her my purposes was not in the dusty street, with people casting us curious glances. I should have done it before we set off. So I shut down the camera and we walked to the pharmacy, hoping to get her to understand my purpose before she took the test.

“Why do you want to take a test?” the lady behind the counter asked the young girl, who in reply gave her a big grin and a giggle.

Forced child labor, one of the issues I will tackle in this film.

“Well," the girl said, "You see, I have a little goat at home and I want to know if it is pregnant.”

The pharmacist was not amused. She turned to me, her lips pursed in anger. “Did you pregnant her?”

“NO!” I screamed. “I don’t sleep with goats!”

The girl chuckled. There were several other people in the pharmacy. They overhead my protest and cast me a curious glance, as though to say ‘You protest too much!’

“You think you can fool me with your stupid goat story?” the lady barked at me. “Aren’t you ashamed to sleep with little girls? She’s young enough to be your daughter! Are there no old women for you to play with?”

The anger on her face indicated that she had not been laid for a really long time. She was the bulky type – extra big breasts, too big that they looked like she had stuffed herself with a lot of clothing to make them look that big. Her waist line indicated she had given birth ten times or more. She looked over forty, though with her size it was hard to tell. Since I have a perverted writer’s mind, I started to imagine what it would be like for a man to mount a trailer-like being like this one. Will he be able to find her hole, or will he poke the area around her thighs and think he has found it? Won’t she squash him if she went on top? Will the bed break because of too much vibration from this giant? She reminded me of a horror film I once saw, in which a band of youth found a monstrous, vampire animal in bed and it seduced them into banging her. Of course, every boy who had sex with her turned into a vampire. As I stood there looking at her, I did imagine that she could be a great character for a horror-erotic tale.

“Are you jealous?” the girl asked her.

“Me? Jealous? Of what?”

“You are already old,” the girl said. “Why should you be jealous that I’m getting a lot of it while men ignore you?” I clamped my palm on her mouth, but she wriggled away and continued to taunt the woman. “You are old and shapeless! No man can enjoy you! Don't be jealous of me! I’ll give you advice. Use bananas. They are better than men and they don’t make you pregnant!”

Have you seen The Felistas Fable? It is a hot romantic comedy! Click here to watch it on YouTube

The pharmacy suddenly fell silent. Everyone turned to the girl. The woman was puffing up in anger and I was sure she would explode like a pricked balloon. As bad luck would have it, a policeman walked into the shop as that very moment, and the fat woman at once shouted at him.

“Ah! You came at the right time officer! This man has defiled and impregnated this young girl!”

Next thing I knew, I was in Seeta police post, facing a uniformed officer who had such a huge belly that he was not able to button his shirt. He left it hanging open, a dirty looking vest concealing his obscene tummy. An odor wafted from his armpits, but luckily, a ceiling fan blew it out of the window so I did not have to suffer like the characters in The Felistas Fable.

“You will go to jail for seven years,” the policeman said. "Defilement, or sex with a minor, is a capital offense. You might even be sentenced to death." He had introduced himself as the OC, the officer in charge of the police post. All I saw was an officer in charge of corruption. “But it depends on how you want to handle it.”

Street children 'bounce' past uncaring adults in Kampala.
Their tale is one of parents failing to cope with teenagers.

“I don’t even know the girl’s name,” I said.

“Really? Then how did you seduce her? Is she a prostitute?”

“I did not seduce her!”

“So why do you want her to test for pregnancy?”

They had seen my camera. They had heard my story already, but like many other Ugandans, they do not understand the concept of a creative documentary. They asked me, ‘Which NGO is funding it?’ ‘It is for TV news? Which TV? Show us your ID.’ When I could not prove that I was working for an NGO, or any TV station, it confirmed to them my guilt.

To make matters worse, the girl had escaped. She fled the moment the cop pounced on me. I did not know her names, or where she came from.

"We are human beings," the policeman said. "Talk to us, we shall understand. Just kitu kidogo will be able to clear your name."

I was so broke, having just finished making The Felistas Fable, that I could not afford the smallest of bribes, not even of ten thousand shillings for that would make me starve for two days. My only option seemed to be with Nalongo. She would testify on my behalf and save me.

But when she heard I was in police hands, she refused to come. She switched off her phone, closed her shop and vanished. She has since migrated from the area. Her flight tended to confirm my earlier suspicions that this whole thing was a scam.

So there I was, in the police station facing a fictitious crime, victim unknown. I haggled with the policemen for nearly six hours. Eventually, they let me go, but I was fifty thousand shillings poorer. I cursed all the way back home. I had lost enough money to feed me for five days.

The street child rapper, Razor Blade, performing in a night club

Still, the incident sowed the seeds of a story. I then proceeded to find other characters, and so far I have a street child who wants to be a music star. He is a talented rapper who goes by the names Razor Blade. He ran away from home following a disagreement with his parents. I have not yet got the full story, but it surely fits the theme of broken families and parent-teenager disconnect in Uganda today.

And the time spent in the police post was not entirely wasted. I heard about two other pregnant girls (one also by her teacher, the other by a fellow teenager). If I play my cards well, one of them will end up in the film. I hope it is the girl who got defiled by her teacher.

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This story is fictional, inspired by this photo
of the love of my life.

In spite of the thermal underwear, the cold dug into his bones and froze him in a bleak mood. The sun tried to smile from beyond the mountains, but her frigid rays could not cheer him up. He longed for Africa, where the sun shone all year with the sweet warmth of a lover.

He decided to go back home immediately after searching the last temple. The whole trip had turned out to be a complete waste of time and money. A friend had deceived him that the temples of Kathmandu were littered with golden statues. It would be an easy job. Sneak in. Steal a few. Flee back home a millionaire. How foolish he felt when he discovered that the golden statues were not made of gold. Still, he hoped that the last item on his list, the Chandeswori temple had a roof of pure gold as one book claimed. So he ignored the cold and hurried to this temple.

On the way, in ancient streets of Old Banepa, he saw her.

He rubbed his eyes in disbelief. She sat stark naked in the street, fondling a sarangi, which hid her nakedness from his view. Her smile made her face to sparkle like a million stars. It warmed him in a way the sun failed to. He could not breathe. He swayed in a drunken swoon. Why is she sitting in the street with only a musical instrument to cloth her? Can’t she feel the cold?

Her hair fell over her face so that he could see only one eye, which glistened with the smile on her mouth as she looked right back at him. Heat gushed through his veins with such speed that his heart beat with the wild rhythm of Acholi war drums.

“Do you like her?” a voice shattered his reverie.

He jumped with a frightened squeal and turned to face a man whose clothes were splotched with paint. He might have been a painter. He had come out of a tea shop.

African tourists in Chandeswori temple in Banepa.
Legend has it that once upon a time, the roof was
made of pure gold.

“Hi!” the African screeched with embarrassment.

“Do you like her?”

“Ugh?”

“You can have her for eight thousand only.”

Eight thousand? So little for so beautiful a girl! The African dashed into his pockets for the rupees, but he stopped, realizing something wrong with the girl. She sat so still, like a picture, and even the breeze didn’t ruffle her long hair. Is she some kind of religious freak in meditation? Is she a painting?

The realization hit him with such force that his stupidity became as clear as the smile on her face. He ran over to her, touched her cold skin of canvas, and nodded to acknowledge the work of a genius artist.

“Did you paint her?”

“Yes.”

His heart still beat. Though she was merely a picture, he was in love. He wanted to take her home and kiss – maybe, as it happened in fairy tales, his kiss would turn her into a real person.

More paintings, of mountains and rural landscapes, hang inside the tea shop. All ordinary work. He wanted this girl. But why pay eight thousand rupees when he could return at night and take her for free? Maybe he will sell her in Paris for a million dollars. Isn’t she equal to Monalisa? Maybe his gods led him to Nepal, not to steal golden statues but this girl.

He licked his lips, still feeling dizzy like a drunk. He could not take his eyes off her smile, her smooth skin, her sarangi – it reminded him of Toni Braxton’s Spanish Guitar, and so he named the painting ‘Nepali Sarangi’. He loved the way her hair fell over her face to hide one eye, the way only four teeth showed in her smile. Her enchanting smile.

Recommended Video: The Sound of One Leg Dancing. Watch on YouTube.

“Did you just imagine her, or is she a real person? Maybe your sister, ugh?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“Yes what? Is she imaginary?”

“No! Imaginary no. Real. Look!”

The artist showed him a photo in a mobile phone. If he had looked carefully, he might have noticed that it was a photo of a very old photo, but the veil of love fell over his eyes. He had to meet her, to marry her, to take her back home.

“You like her?”

The African smiled like a bewitched prince. He knew that in Nepali culture, people preferred arranged marriages. No dating, no love, no fooling around with the heart. The bride and groom meet for the first time on their wedding day.

“E-e!” the artist giggled like a teenage girl. “You like her very much!”

“Is she – maybe – married?”

“She? No. No. Not married. Are you married?”

“Me? No. Never.”

“Do you want to marry with her?”

The African could not believe his good luck. It was like Juliet’s father placing a hand over Romeo’s shoulders and asking, ‘do you want to marry her? We can arrange it now!’

A Nepali bride in Chandeswori temple

“Can you arrange it?”

“Yes! Yes! No problem! I talk her! She agree! No problem!”

“Just like that?”

“Yes! She my mother.”

“Your mother?”

“No. Not real mother. My mother’s sister, but I call her mother.”

“How old is she?”

The artist laughed, but did not answer that question. “Where are you from?”

“America,” the African said without hesitation. He wanted them to not only think that he was very rich, but once he took her home, they would never hear from him again, or see their pretty girl. “I’m from USA. Obama is my uncle.”

“O-hoo!” the artist’s mouth became round in shock. When he had recovered, he added, “In your country, first love, then marriage. Here, first marriage, then love. She very faithful. She never leave you.”

The African could hear the girl playing the sarangi, a tune so sweet that he floated in the clouds. But she is just a picture. First, he had to meet her, study her, and then decide whether to marry her. Yet he had no time. He could not afford to stay in Nepal for another week. And this girl was a better prize than all the golden statues of the world.

“She widow,” the artist said. “Two day after marriage, her husband go to fight. You know Gurkha? He soldier. She play for him sarangi before he go. It is last time they together. In our culture, woman cannot marry two times. She very sad. She want marry to another man her but no man take her.”

“Stupid Nepali men.”

“But you bidesh, hoina? You habsi. You take her! No problem.”

For two days, he stayed in the artist’s home as they arranged for the wedding. He promised the artist a lot of money, so the artist ran around to make it happen in two days. Luckily, it was the wedding month.

The day came. He endured so many Hindu rituals like a zombie. They spoke to him in a strange language. The artist was not always available to interpret, so he did whatever they gestured at him to do. At one point, he found himself sitting beside a grandmother dressed up as a bride.

He thought it funny.

A grandmother so old she had no teeth, all dressed up like a bride. She sat beside him, smiling. He knew that smile for he had seen it on the girl. Maybe this is her grandmother.

He thought they were doing something similar to the kwanjula ceremony back home, where the bride’s family parade many girls for the groom to pick, but the groom has to reject all until they reveal the real bride. So maybe this grandmother is a customary surrogate until the time is right for the bride to appear.

In a strange way, it all started with this story :-)

Time passed. The bride did not show up. He grew impatient. Night came. The dancing started. Though he did not understand what was happening, he knew people dance only after the marriage. But where is his bride? Nervous, he asked the artist.

“What you mean?” the artist said.

“I want to see the girl?”

“Eh!” the artist seemed truly shocked. “You not seen her?” He pointed at the grandmother. “Her?”

The African looked at the old woman, at the toothless and wrinkled smile that in the picture had set him alight with a fire of a thousand suns.

“I paint her photo – old, old photo, what she look like when still young.”

The African felt a bitter dryness in his mouth as he discovered he was a character in a badly written joke. A corny joke that nevertheless knocked him out with the sheer force of its obviousness.

“What’s the problem?” the grandmother asked the artist. “Why is he troubled?”

“Nothing,” the artist said.

“Is he worried that I did it?”

“No.”

“Tell him I didn’t.”

“No!”

“I have never done it! Tell him!”

So the artist turned to the African with a big smile and said, “Good news for you, my friend. She say her husband die before they – you know. She’s still a virgin.”

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Welcome to He Says, She Says Sundays! A battle of the sexes. Two different opinions on a jointly enjoyed experience! Have fun reading them both!

He says:

The idea of traveling by bus from Kampala to Mombasa seemed romantic. But I did not know it would turn out to be like something from a Robert James Waller novel! When I mention The Bridges of Madison County, it does not mean I met a forty-something year old farmer’s wife who was looking for Prince Charming. I had a princess right by my side when I set off from Kampala. But with all the cameras dangling on my neck, I did feel like a younger version of Robert Kincaid who is courageous enough to steal Francesca from the sexless and passionless farm, and that dreary life in Madison County, and run away with her to live as wanderers, not knowing where tomorrow will find us.

I did not think of that analogue as we set off, but twenty four hours on the road made me think of that fictitious NatGeo photographer. And there being very few toilet breaks, it seemed even longer. It was the longest bus ride I had ever taken in my life. But the decision not to fly was a good one, because for a tenth of an air ticket, I got the adventure of my lifetime and a free safari through the game parks of Kenya!

We took Queen’s Coach, which turned out to be the real deal. It was much more comfortable than we had imagined. It was squeaky clean, air-conditioned, and the seats were spacious comfortable. We got a feeling we were in a plane. It set off at 8 pm on the dot, the speed was steady, the driver careful. We wished it was taking us all the way to Mombasa. They even served snacks on board, which completed the illusion that we were on a plane.

A food stop on Mombasa high-way

The princess had packed a lot of food. Pizza, biscuits, rolex (a Ugandan fast food comprising of chapati and eggs), fruit juice, sodas---so much food that I thought we were going to a party! If you want to know why men are from the sun and women are from moon, just ask them to pack a bag for a trip. She insisted we did not need a lot of clothing. “It’s only for two weeks,” she argued. “Take only three shirts.” Wow, what if they get dirty, madam? “We’ll wash them.” I did not fancy doing laundry on a holiday, but sometimes it is hard to argue with a girl. However, I insisted on packing a sweater. “It’s only taking up space!” and I mentioned that traveling at night requires warm clothing. I was proved right. At three am on the highway, the cold bit into our bones with such ferocity that she stole the only sweater she had allowed us to pack! Being a gentleman, I let her have it.

Brings me back to the amount of food she packed. It beat my understanding, why she preferred to take so little clothing and so much food. When we got into the bus, the food was practically useless, for the Queens coach staff served us with snacks. Coffee or tea? Cakes? Breads? Soda? We had a whole variety to choose from.

And we debated over taking my laptop. She said it was too heavy. But how could I survive for two weeks without my laptop? I tried to point out that if we lighten our load by leaving behind some of that food – of course I did not finish making my point. But I still took the laptop, and she carried it all the way, grumbling about its weight. Poor girl. The moment we reached Mombasa, she was the first to demand using it to update her status on Facebook. I almost said “I told you we’d need it”, but being a gentleman, I simply smiled and let her have her way.

Four hours after setting off from Kampala, we stopped at the border town of Malaba. We bought Kenyan shillings from money-changers with unbelievably cheap rates. On the Ugandan side, the customs people were nice and smiley and did not give us any trouble. But on the Kenyan side, they were nice and smiley and wanted a bribe because I had not carried my Yellow fever certificate. Well, not all of them, just this one policeman who was doing some kind of security check. He saw me traveling with a foreigner and he thought he had fallen into a pot of honey. Luckily, Reiza had hers, otherwise she would have been forced to cough up a hundred dollars in bribes. It happened to her once in Nairobi airport. Since then she learned to carry her yellow fever card whenever facing Kenyan custom officials.

Well, the toilets in Malaba were awful, and expensive to use, so we decided to take our chances avoided them. Turned out to be a bad idea. We did not get a break again for the next seven or so hours, until we were in Naivasha (or was it Nakuru), when the bus stopped for about an hour. Everybody rushed to the bathrooms, then to a nearby restaurant to grab a quick breakfast. (Again, I asked myself, why all that packed food?)

This lady can eat!

Since it was daylight now, the joys of traveling through Kenya by road started to show. First we passed the Rift Valley. The spectacular views were even made more enchanting by the morning mists, with the sun just coming up from behind some distant mountains.

Then, just before reaching Nairobi, we passed a game park. Reiza saw her first zebras that morning. She was frozen in a mixture of excitement and shock, as you can see in the photo. She wanted to tell the bus driver to stop so we could get out and enjoy it all, but she restrained herself. It begun to think of the three hundred dollars she paid for a safari to Murchison falls in Uganda. She did not get to see any zebras then! Yet here she was, on a bus, and there were zebras right on the roadside, grazing gently, unperturbed by the bustle of vehicles on the highway.


I did not exactly capture her reaction to seeing the zebras but trust me, she screamed that everyone in the bus stared!

By the time we reached Nairobi at about 9am, her excitement had trebled. The bus deposited us near River Road. We did not know Nairobi very well, and were wary of muggers, but we managed to find a bus to Mombasa without much trouble. We picked Mash Poa at random, and it was comfortable enough. Though it had no air-conditioning, which on the road to Mombasa is necessary because we passed through arid areas with the temperatures at nearly 40 degrees, we at least could open the windows.

The road to Mombasa had more surprises that made her squeal every mile or so, much to the bemusement of the other passengers. However by this time, we were starved of sleep, and were wishing we had rested in Nairobi before proceeding. It being only about eight hours from Nairobi, we thought we could handle it. But we made a wrong decision of setting off from Nairobi at 11am, first because we were on the road in a bus with no AC when the heat of the day was at its worst. A night journey would have been friendly, but that would mean missing out on game. We saw more zebras, and this time giraffes as well, but the best of all sights were the red elephants of Tsavo. We saw three of them standing by the roadside. The bus was too fast, and by then our reflexes was dulled by exhaustion, so we failed to take the photos. We had to content ourselves with the images of the red elephants being burned into our brains for the moment.

Of course, they are not elephants.
But you see my point about animals by the roadside.

We reached Mombasa at about 6pm, and our second mistake struck us. We should have timed our departure from Nairobi properly. This was Friday, and we ran into the worst jam I’ve ever experienced. It took us more than two and a half hours to get into Mombasa town from its outskirts. By that time, after more than twenty four hours on the road, all I wanted was to sleep. I nearly cried in frustration, and in pain for I was dying to pee, but there was nothing we could do other than endure. We finally took a taxi to Nirvana Backpackers and at least the accommodation there was so comfortable we fell asleep before we knew it.

She says:

Even before we became an item, Dilman and I were tickled by this idea of a road trip around Africa, filming our experiences along the way in the hopes of baking a mean documentary and whipping a bestseller. You know, two strangers travelling together for six months. Will they fall in love or beg the gods to not let their paths cross ever again? Weave in the inter-racial thread in the picture, and you get yourself a money-making venture, people!

To read the rest of her reaction to this post, please click here.

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Food will bring love to your heart.

They say that the way into a man’s heart is through his stomach, and that the best way to get into a woman’s pants is through her mouth! Ah, so food has great romantic values. It is the essence of every relationship, and if you are looking at a girl whose heart you want to win, food can fast forward your dating past the boring stuff and straight into the bed stuff. Of course, what every man does is to take her out to the fancy restaurants and impress her with fine dining and seven course meals and wine. But I’m going to tell you a secret. You can save yourself all that money and thrill her with a meal in your bachelor pad. Women totally love men who can cook. Pans will get you into her pants. Pots make her hot. Ahem, before I offend women here, let me rephrase. The easiest way for a man to get a woman to love him and be his wife is for him to cook for her a really good meal.

When you cook for a woman, the message you are sending is that you are a sensitive fellow. That you will not overwork her with household chores. That every once in a while she will kick off her shoes, lounge on the sofa with her legs on the coffee table, reading a newspaper or watching TV, while you fight with pots in the kitchen. It also means that you care for her, and that you treat her like a good dish, that is, you will be patient with her, take things slow, and you will not be interested only in appetizers but want to go the whole way to the desert and the nap after the meal.

The only problem is that most men do not know how to cook. Which is why I’m writing this post. I will give you a few tips on how to make meals that sound exotic, look romantic, and will make her believe you are the greatest chef on earth. I guess a woman reading this can also pretend to be a good cook to impress the man. So here are the dishes.

Tip. When you are telling the girl you will prepare her a meal, use exotic and classy sounding names. Use words that are not common in the area. For example, if you are in a place where they say spaghetti or macaroni, tell her you will make her chowmein (which is how it’s called in many Asian countries) or lasagna.

A man hawks grilled chicken at the roadside. Mabira, Uganda

Shredded chicken

This should be number one on the list. It’s a Chinese dish. It will make the girl think you have class. Yet making it is so simple you will wonder why you haven’t yet done it. In fact, you do not need to cook this one at all. You can buy the rice from a restaurant and then get the grilled chicken from the roadside, sneak into the kitchen when the girl isn’t watching and perform the magic.

Ingredients.

1 roasted chicken

2 plates boiled rice (one for you, one for the girl)

2 tomatoes

1 cucumber

2 carrots. Cabbages. Soy sauce. Salad cream.

Method. Cut the grilled chicken into tiny shreds. Slice up the tomatoes, cucumber, carrots and cabbages, and mix them with the chicken shreds (basically, you are making salads). Pour salad cream on the stuff. Pour soy sauce (a Chinese/East Asian thing) over the boiled rice, and serve! Man, I promise you, she will take off her pants without you asking her to do it!

Tip: You can use the same trick to make sweet and sour fish. Simply buy deep fried fish from the roadside, or stewed fish, and re-cook it, but this time, add pineapples.

Enjoy this dark comedy about an adulterous affair that goes wrong. The woman ends up dead. The man races against time to hide her corpse, while her husband pursue him. Watch it on YouTube. 18 minutes. No dialog.

Jaulo

This is a Nepali dish. It is mostly made for sick people, but she doesn’t have to know that. Just tell her this is a dish from a country called Nepal. Most women, being easily impressionable, will not bother to google and find out the truth. They will want to believe you (just as they believe everything you tell them until you make them really angry and then they will not believe anything you say.) I like this dish because you do not have to do a lot of work to have a meal. Basically, it’s like this; you dump all the ingredients into a pressure cooker, wait for it to whistle three times, turn off the gas, and bingo, you have a meal! What can be easier than that? But for those who love recipes, here are the guidelines: D

A roadside chef (in apron). He must have many wives!

Ingredients:

1 cup of Rice

1 cup of lentils (or peas, or beans, or any seeds)

1 onion

3 ripe tomatoes

2 table spoons of ghee

8 Irish potatoes (ha, that is the small type, not the sweet potatoes. Many people are often surprised when they hear Ugandans calling potatoes Irish. I wonder how it started, but well, that’s how we differentiate between the small, tasteless potatoes and the big sweet ones here in Uganda.)

Method: Throw the ghee onto a pan. Cut up the onions and dump them into the hot ghee. Let it turn golden brown. Pour in squashed tomatoes (Just put the tomatoes in a bowl, squash them with your fingers). Wait until it has cooked into a paste. Dump in the sliced potatoes, the lentils, and the rice. Add appropriate amount of water. A cup should be okay. Then wait for the cooker to whistle three times, and bingo, you have your meal!

Eggy plants

This one is my very own invention. I should get a copyright for it before some chef out there steals it and claims he came up with it. There is nothing easier to cook than egg plants, but these are really tasteless. So what did I do? I added in eggs. Here is how.

Ingredients:

4 eggplants,

2 eggs

3 ripe tomatoes

1 onion

2 spoons of vegetable oil

2 cups of boiled rice

Method: First boil the rice. Do not bother with any fancy tricks. Put it in a pressure cooker, wait for it to whistle three times, and there you are! Boiled rice. Needless to say, the pressure cooker is a bachelor’s best friend. If you do not have one, go buy it at once. Once you have the rice, now make the eggy plants. Fry the onions in the vegetable oil until golden brown. Throw in squashed tomatoes. The cut up the egg plants into tiny cubes and boil for about ten minutes in a cup of water. When it has turned soft and purplish, throw in the egg and stir. The egg will form a thick paste. You should have the meal ready in less than fifteen minutes!

Many ways to make egg plants look exotic and sexy!
This is Reiza's cooking. :-) And below is my cooking :-)

Groundnut paste, ntula, carrots, boiled rice. Looks yummy!

Stewed sausages.

Another trick of mine. When I’m too lazy to grill or deep fry the sausages, I stew them, often with egg plants, or cabbages, or beans, or some kind of vegetable. They look exotic once served.

Ingredients.

1 cup fresh beans (or peas, or any vegetables)

4 sausages

2 tomatoes

1 onion

Pineapples

50grams of butter

Method: Fry the onions in butter until golden brown. Squash the tomatoes and add it to the onions. Add the beans (or peas, or vegetables). Slice the pineapples into cubes and throw it in. Finally, add the sausages, which you should slice into little round things to make them look different from normal sausages. Serve with rice, or sweet potatoes, or ugali.

Sweet and sour fish at Great Chinese Wall Restaurant Kampala

Honeyed hot lemon

This one is not a meal, but a drink. It will knock her out, though it’s a soft drink. There is nothing like the taste of honey and hot lemons on a chilly night!

Ingredients:

½ lemon

1 litre of water

Honey

Method: Squeeze the lemon into the water and bring to boil. Pour into glasses. Drop in honey until the color of the drink is dark, or as much as you like!

Ginger warmer

Another drink. Real sexy. Beats the hell out of offering her a soda, or a beer, or even wine. Great for a chilly evening.

Ingredients:

½ lemon

1 slice of ginger

1 litre of water

Honey

Method: Crash the ginger and put it in water. Squeeze the lemon into the water. Bring to boil. Pour into glasses. Drop in honey until the color of the drink is dark, or as much as you like!

Okay, I better stop here, because I’m hungry, just thinking about these things. I need to make supper, and someone is coming tomorrow. She is coming tomorrow!

PS: I am a great cook, but when you are in a relationship with a master chef like this Pinoy girl, man you have to stay away from the kitchen. She hardly ever lets me cook for her because I always forget to put in the salt, or I easily get distracted and let the food gets burnt. But she says she doesn’t care if a man can cook or not, what she really cares about is that he should wash the dishes after she has cooked. Hmmm. Gender equality? But that tip I’ll leave it for another blog.

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Retired. Relaxing. Is he enjoying the labor of his youth?
A grandfather passes the time in Nakapinyi, Mukono district.

It's the day when we remember workers of the world. I do not know what made me look through my scrap folder, but I found this poem, which I wrote in October of 2009, shortly before I went to Nepal. I cannot remember why I wrote it, what the 'inspiration' was, but it is clearly about a vegetable seller struggling to make ends meet, and failing to impress his wife. I dedicate it to all working men out there who are going through tough times, who cannot seem to fill their pockets with happiness, however much they try. I normally don't publish poems, though I have written quiet a tidy pile of them, but I do hope you enjoy this one.

The cabbage

He collapses as he pushes the cart to the market

He lies burnt out on the pile of unsold cabbages

Though his weight and sweat ruin the stock.

she hates the necklaces I buy at clearance sales
so I wonder if I married a princess.

The hat rests on his nose

To shield his face from passing eyes

That shine like suns in hollow skulls.

she serves me bread without any butter
so I wonder if I married my mother

His battered body yearns for the balm in a smoke.

He takes a crumpled cigarette from his pocket

But his palms, wet with sweat, ruin the matches.

she makes love to me in autopilot
so I wonder if I married a harlot.

He smashes the hat onto the unsold cabbages

Then the cigarette that he failed to light.

Rage in his feet. He stomps it all into the dirt.

The poem is dated 4^th October 2009. I cannot think of what I was doing on that day that I wrote this poem, but does it capture the mood of a frustrated worker?

A fruit seller waits for customers in Lainchor, Kathmandu, Nepal

Salute women for their ability to multi-task.
Here is a hair dresser, vegetable seller and baby sitter.

An egg hawker in Lazimpart, Kathmandu, Nepal

Unrecognized labor. A boy hawks firewood in Soroti, Uganda.

Fruits of labor. Sorghum harvest in Katakwi, Uganda.

I should be particularly on for this labor day. Normally, writers are not considered as laborers. People always think of a worker as someone who has a boss, and earns a regularly salary. But I think I am a worker too, though I mostly idle around the house farting and hoping for a big break -- I think it is coming soon. Finally, after a long struggle, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I was shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2013, for a short story I wrote way back in 2002 but has never been published. You can read about it here. I do hope this short list opens doors for me, and puts me on the path to becoming a writer who earns a living from his fantasies :-)

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Being a chameleon

When the year begun, I was broke. I had spent much of last year finishing The Felistas Fable, and had not earned much during that time. I felt low, for it is not possible to quickly make a profit from selling a film. Sometimes you have to wait a whole year. I felt depressed in frustration. Then, out of the gloom, I got shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. I had a reason to smile. I had waited for this kind of news for twenty years, since I became obsessed with writing at the age of fifteen. The frustration of not making it compelled me to branch out into film making in 2006. Shortly after that, I got nominated for the Million Writers Award, in 2008, which was a sign that I should stick to writing. But by that time, I already had one leg in both places. when the Commonwealth shortlist came, it was more than just a sign. It was a reminder that I should return to my roots, or rather that I should concentrate less on film and throw more energy onto writing. Winning the prize would be the best thing to happen to my career.

The first story I published, about a cowardly soldier in the front line.
The Sunday Vision, February 2001

Everyday, I prayed to let me win. At least it would alleviate the brokenness (and maybe it's because I was thinking more of the cash than the prize that God didn't let me win :-o ). I got the bad news last week, just before I set off for Nairobi. At first, when I saw the email from JB of the Commonwealth, I thought it would tell me I was a winner. But I had a bad feeling. I had not gone to church the previous Sunday. In my superstitious mind, I thought God would punish me for it. Indeed, it was a regrets email, but JB added an encouraging note that my story had been in contention right up to the very last minute (I guess s/he told every other contestant the same thing). The depression returned, and with it the lack of confidence, the fear that I will never make it.

But then, as I sat in the bus to Nairobi, I got a revelation, a sign that good things are to come.

This story that got shortlisted, A Killing in the Sun, is a ghost story. I wrote it in 2001 or 2002, I cannot remember, but it was shortly after I saw a photograph in the front pages of The New Vision. It was the picture of one of the two soldiers sentenced to death for killing a priest in Karamoja, taken a few moments before he was shot by firing squad. As I looked at that photo, at the expression on the man's face, at his unzipped pants exposing a pair of clean white boxers, the story fell in.

News report about a firing squad in Uganda. The Fort Scott Tribune. 10th Sept 1977
The shortlisted story is about a soldier facing a death sentence.

Well, I had actually thought of the story for many years before that. You see, I had a nightmare when I was about twelve, or thirteen, and in the dream three cloaked hags with pockmarked faces and long bony fingers were grinning at me. Their yellow teeth looked more like shards of bones. They wanted to eat me.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce influenced my shortlisted story.

Two works of art that I know influenced this story were the short story by Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and the 1990 horror film by Adrian Lyne, Jacob's Ladder.

After I wrote the story, I never tried to sell it. It sat in my computer for ten years, ignored, until I submitted it for discussion to a writer's group, which is organized and run by Beatrice Lamwaka, who was shortlisted for the 2011 Caine Prize. The reaction of fellow writers to this story made me think that I was sitting on a masterpiece. They told me it's the kind of story that will win international prizes. I was encouraged to send it to the Commonwealth competition, and was pleased when it got shortlisted. I was depressed when it did not win, just as I get depressed each time I get a rejection letter.

This film, one of the best horrors I've
ever seen, influenced A Killing in the Sun.

But last Thursday, as I sat in the bus heading to Nairobi, something happened that lifted my moods. Something that every writer needs every now and then to keep their spirits out. The seat next to me was empty. I did wonder about it, for this was Queens Coach, a popular bus that never fails to sell all its seats. But I did not give it much thought. I was too sleepy. I had not slept much for nearly a week. I dozed off shortly after the bus took off.

Suddenly, a woman woke me up with a very friendly "Hello." I opened my eyes, and at once noticed we were in Jinja. Then I got angry. Couldn't this woman see I was sleeping? Why did she have to wake me up? Being the gentleman my mother raised, I swallowed my irritation and replied with a smile and a hello. Turned out to be a bad idea. She was a chatter box. She at once started telling me the story of her life, as though we were old friends who had not seen each other for a very long time. Her openness shocked and amused me. Her determination to tell her story irritated me. I wanted her to shut up so I could get some sleep, but she just would not keep quiet. Finally, I told her I wanted to sleep, and she said, 'Okay', and I dozed off for a few seconds. But the moment I woke up, she plunged into her life story.

I loved writing about soldiers back then.

Out of politeness, I forced myself to keep awake and listen. Sometimes, I would fail, and would sleep off, but she would not notice and keep talking.She gave me a blow by blow account of how she developed some medical condition, how she was in an operation theater for twenty four hours, how the doctors removed her large intestines to save her life and so she could not poo like everyone else. She needed colostomy to help her pass out shit. She told me about a bunch of other conditions that threatened her life, and that if she was not a Scottish citizen with access to free, good quality medical treatment, she might have died. She is a Ugandan whose husband, a Ugandan as well, joined the British Navy and now they live in Scotland. I soon discovered the reason she was telling me all this. She simply wanted to warn me that in the event I heard a bad smell, I shouldn't laugh, or make her feel uncomfortable, for because the lack of a large intestine makes her susceptible to passing out stool uncontrollably. Poor woman.

After talking about this for two hours, all the way from Jinja to Malaba, the topic somehow shifted to ghost tales. I did not hear of anything else but ghosts for the rest of the night, until we reached Nairobi. She is a university graduate, works with an international NGO as a consultant, and is a very strong Catholic, but I was not surprised by her belief in spirits. Anyone who has gone through a near-death-experience will believe in the supernatural. However, her endless encounters with creatures from the other world that made me raise an eyebrow.

The one I remember vividly is how an angel of death visited her. She said that she woke up one night and noticed there was a man in her room. She could not imagine how he got in. She was about to scream when he told her, 'You are going to die tomorrow in a car accident.' She replied, 'No, I will not die.' The man insisted, 'You will die.' So she said a prayer (or maybe she threw a bible at him, I was dozing and did not get this detail properly) and he vanished. She went to her mother's bedroom, and told her mother about this strange man. But her mother simply said, 'You had a bad dream, my dear. Go back to sleep.' The next day, she avoided vehicles. She traveled in boda boda motorcycles, and at the end of the day, as she was heading back home, just when she thought she had eluded the prophecy, the man reappeared. She saw a motorcycle in the bush. She at once knew something was wrong about this bike, for it was in the middle of a bush. Not in the road! Then she saw the man straddling it, and her blood froze. It was the same man who visited her room in the night. He kicked started his motorcycle, and it out of the bush into the rode. It sped towards her, to crash into the motorcycle she was on. Luckily, her boda rider was an expert. He dodged it. They skidded and nearly crashed, but managed to stop without injury. People were screaming at the ghost rider, which means they could see him and he was not a figment of her imagination. He rode away and vanished as some people tried to intercept him. She fell on her knees and thanked God for sparing her life.

That was just one of the ghost tales she told me. There were about twelve others, some of which I remember, like the one about her cousin, a little girl who could not walk. A catholic exorcist told the mother, 'A demon is sitting on her leg. But I cannot drive it out of the girl without injuring her. I have to send it into you. Do you agree?' The mother nodded. She wanted her little girl to walk. So the exorcist, called Vincent, I think, drove the demon out of the girl into the mother. The girl begun to walk. The mother ran mad. A few days later the exorcist drove the demon out of the mother. Now the family is fine.

When I reached Nairobi, I no longer felt bad about losing out on the Commonwealth prize. It had to be a sign from the supernatural creator that I shared a seat with a woman who talked about nothing but ghosts on the day I received a rejection letter about my ghost story. Like another friend of mine, Beverly, said, 'Coming second is as good as a win. Do not lose heart. A great door has been opened for you.'

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anybody reading?

laughter sells more than horror

The Idi Amin Effect

I Suffer to Entertain You

The other day, I was looking through my archived videos of Nepal, trying to decide what to delete to create space in my backup hard drive. I found this interview of Binod, a resident of Saptari district, a man who ran mad after his love affair with an upper caste girl came to an abrupt and violent end. I came upon him by sheer luck. While making Untouchable Love, I was visiting their home to interview his younger brother, Manoj, whose affair with Parbati, an upper caste girl, had led to a war in their village when I learned that that Binod too had been involved in an inter caste affair. I thought I had struck gold. Two dalit (untouchable) brothers fall in love with upper caste girls, causing a lot of trouble in the village, hmm, the kind of stuff every storyteller would jump at.

In their village, like everywhere else in Nepal, the different castes live together. The apartheid-like system that kept ‘untouchables’ in the outskirts of society no longer exists. Children from all castes mingle freely, attend the same school, play with in the same balls, grow up together – the only thing that still exists is that they cannot enter each other’s houses, or eat from the same plate, or drink the same water. Or fall in love with each other.

The way the two brothers fell in love was very similar. Both upper caste girls were their neighbors. They went to school together and were in the same classes. Binod, being older, was first to become romantically involved with (I do not remember him mentioning her name, so I will call her) Sita. As it is with love affairs in rural Nepal, the issue of marriage came in very early in the relationship. In that country, you do not date for fun, and Binod was so serious about his girl that he went to her parents to ask for her hand in marriage.

A very foolish thing, but very brave. Of course he knew about the taboos in the society. He knew that being a Mandal (or Khanga as they are sometimes called) it was unthinkable for him to marry a girl with the name of Raut. Still, their respective families were amiable to each other. He thought he could talk to her parents, they seemed like a nice lot, more liberal in comparison to other Rauts. So he dressed in his Sunday best and paid them a visit. Her father gave him a big smile and told him he will think about it. However, hardly had Binod left their compound than the old man pounced on Sita, and beat her up thoroughly. She was imprisoned in a room for several days and tortured until she denounced her love. Then they arranged for her to marry another man, an upper caste old widower whose teeth were black and rotten from eating paan, whose saliva was now permanently a bloody red from eating paan. This was the only way her parents thought they could restore the family honor.

Binod and one of his brother's children.

Binod was devastated. He ran mad. Totally bonkers. I do not know exactly what he did that proved how mad he was, but all the wires in his head were broken. He ended up in a mental hospital in India. He spent there several months. Whatever treatment he got seemed to work very well. He came back to Nepal a sane man. The first thing he did was burn up all the photographs of Sita, along with all the love letters she sent him. It was the only way he could fully recover his sanity. To help him fully recover, his parents arranged for him to marry another girl.

He despises his wife. He kept referring to her as ‘uneducated’ and ‘foolish’. I could discern that deep inside he still moaned for his lost love. He apparently is still in a fragile state, although eight years have passed. When his parents heard him talking about Sita, they became afraid. And very angry with me. They thought memories of Sita would make him run mad again. They ordered to stop talking about her, and threatened to throw us out of their home if we insisted on asking him about her. I was sad to let it go, but I had to agree to their demands. We spent three days with them family, and I never saw Binod again. They must have sent him away to live somewhere else, to make sure he did not talk about Sita again. His younger brother Manoj told me the rest of the story.

Watch the brief interview with Binod here on YouTube. http://youtu.be/9FUBIGTq84c

Binod's wife in front of their home.

Parbati prepares to apply sindoor on her forehead.
It is part of the daily make up for a married woman.

Binod and Manoj's mother with sindoor prominent on her head
a proud symbol of her marital status.

Now sisters. Binod's wife in green, from an arranged marriage.
Parbati on the left, from a love marriage.

About one year after Binod’s affair ended in tragedy, Manoj fell in love with another Raut girl, called Parbati. Manoj was wiser. He kept his affair a total secret. Only a few friends knew about it. When they decided to get married, they did not bother telling their parents. They told no one. They simply sneaked away to a temple in Rajbiraj town, with a couple of friends as witnesses. He applied sindoor on her head and bingo, they were husband and wife. Sindoor is that red thing that you see in the parting of hair just above the forehead. It symbolizes virginity. I was told that you can rape a girl by simply applying that thing on her forehead. Well, it is like the ring in Western weddings. Once a boy applies it on a girl, it means he has deflowered her, and owns her forever. No priests needed, no fancy ceremony. Simply rub the stuff on her forehead and you are married. But they had to take a photo to prove that he had put sindooron her, that they were now married.

After the wedding, they could not go back to their homes. They went to live with Manoj’s uncle’s in a neighboring district. They thought they were safe. I won’t tell you their story because I already did in the documentary, Untouchable Love. They are the lead characters. All I’ll say is after their elopement, war broke out in the village. Ethnic cleansing. The upper caste people were fed up of the untouchables snatching away their girls, and so they decided to chase all the dalits from the village. It was violent and bloody.

You can read about it in this report.

Good old Nepal, with so many stories. I cannot believe I lived there for only two years, because I came back with enough stories to last a life time. Strangely, though I’ve lived in Uganda all my life and I often fail to find what to write about. I should soon again travel again to someplace to collect more stories.

If you enjoyed this story, you should follow me on facebook and on twitterand onYouTube.

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Have you been to our YouTube Channel lately? Those of you who have will notice that we have started putting up travel videos. I was looking through my archives and I saw I had a lot of stuff that I filmed in Nepal, as well as in Uganda, and that I had filmed while making one documentary or the other, but ended up not using. Then I thought of making them into short docs, webdocs, whatever they are called, but these are stories that will give you insight on the different cultures I've encountered, as well as tips on how to travel, what to do on your travels, and such things.

Lake Bunyonyi, Uganda

The first is about how to enjoy a holiday in Lake Bunyonyi, in Western Uganda. Things to do in Lake Bunyonyi are very many, but in our recent visit, we did a dozen things that we thought are the coolest and most fun activities while on a holiday in that lake. Enjoy the video here. http://youtu.be/a82XkGOpuHg Hope it inspires you.


Interviewing the Batwa, in Lake Bunyonyi. Documentaries have enabled me to travel far and wide.

A pretty girl, with whose family I stayed while in Nepal. Very friendly people.

While in Nepal, I encountered many types of people, doing many careers. The ones who intrigued me the most were the gold makers. You would think that someone whose duty it is to make gold would be rich, would be from the upper caste. Apparently, gold makers, otherwise called Sunar in the caste system, were at the bottom of the rung. They were untouchable. I have never been able to figure out this caste system. Why did they put all artists into the untouchable category? Musicians (Damai), jewelers (Sunar), blacksmiths (Bishwarkarma), shoe makers (Kamai), Entertainers (Badi) and many others. They were all bundled up as untouchables. Even architects and builders. Yet, strangely, the upper castes used to enjoy the works of these categories, wear the jewelry, live in the houses they built, dance to their music. I think it's something like slave labor. I visited a shop where they make gold items, in Biratnagar, the second biggest city in Nepal, in the east of that country. Here is the video. http://youtu.be/kfP-ROL0hLg

Mehendi artwork. A Nepali woman shows love of her husband.

Nepali children at a market.

Ha, you will like this one. We were idle one time in my humble kitchen. I picked out the camera and asked Reiza to say something. She had this green stuff on her face and I did not know what it was. She said it was avocado. I could not understand why. I thought she wanted to become an alien, but apparently, she had a few tips on how a woman can stay beautiful while on the road. How she can look after her skin without having to carry loads of cosmetics and stuff. The more I think about it, the more I wonder why women even bother to buy cosmetics, yet everything they need to become beautiful exists in nature, and is free of charge! Enjoy the video. http://youtu.be/L4QAsWq_jTg

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Doesn't matter what work you are doing.
Stay pretty with natural, beauty products.

Heavy make-up. A girl dressed as Krishna in a Nepali festival.

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Last night, I watched The Party. It put PeterSellers at the top of the list of my favourite comic actors. He makes me laugh with the least effort. I used to think Mr. Bean is hilarious, that Leon Schuster is awesome, that Jim Carrey was the god of comedy, but they all disappointed me at some point. (Okay, he does not beat Woody Allen. I think Woody will be my favourite of all time, because Woody is not just a comic actor, but also a funny writer and director. I’ll do a list of my favourite Woody Allen’s next). With Sellers, every film of his I’ve seen is a riot. Or well, maybe not The Man Who Never Was, but again, it was a very entertaining film, and it only confirmed to me that he was gifted actor, able to fit any role, be it comedic of serious. As happens in the industry, he got typed with comedy (I think) and so most of the films he was given were in that genre.


Peter Sellers. London, 1973. Photo from Wikipedia

Being There (1979) I’ve never watched a film as good as this one, not in a long time. It might be better than Harold and Maude, though they probably share the spoils. It’s about a simple man with a mental disability. He is called Chance. His brains never develop beyond childhood, but it doesn’t make him an idiot, as you might imagine. Certainly not like I Am Sam, or The Rain Man. He has lived for as long as he can remember in the backyard of his benefactor’s house. He is a gardener. It’s the only thing he knows. Then his life turns around when he his guardian dies, and he is thrown out of the house. For the first time, he is out in the streets. He is a guy who has never been outside the doors in decades, and what follows is a sweetly sad story with a weirdly happy ending. He ends up the President of the USA! Okay, maybe not. But you get the feeling that he will be the next one. :)

Have you seen What Happened In Room 13?

A black comedy on YouTube.

I particularly loved the acting in that film. I’ve read that Sellers went to great lengths to perfect his portrayal of Chance, he changed his voice and the way the character walked. According to wikipeadia, “Sellers considered Chance's walking and voice the character's most important attributes, and in preparing for the role, he worked alone with a tape recorder, or with his wife, and then with Ashby, to perfect the clear enunciation and flat delivery needed to reveal ‘the childlike mind behind the words’,” and that in order to remain in character, he refused to do interviews and kept aloof from the other actors. I love such an actor. He should have won all the awards for that role. Quoting wiki again “Critic Frank Richwrote that the acting skill required for this sort of role, with a "schismatic personality that Peter had to convey with strenuous vocal and gestural technique … A lesser actor would have made the character's mental dysfunction flamboyant and drastic … [His] intelligence was always deeper, his onscreen confidence greater, his technique much more finely honed": in achieving this, Sellers "makes the film's fantastic premise credible".

The Party (1968) In this film, Sellers plays an error prone Indian actor, Hrundi V. Bakshi, who accidentally gets an invitation to a high class party. At first I was sceptical, and thought he would end up offending Indians, but by minute fifteen, I saw he was at his best again. I totally believed he was an Indian, with the accent, the subtle head shake, the Namaste hand clasp, the English! My, and do comedies get any better than this? It’s told in the fashion of the films of those days, where everything happens largely in one location. I want to write such a film soon.

The Ladykillers (1955). At first, I thought it was a film about hunks who ‘kill’ ladies. Then, I thought it was a film about a gang of psychopaths who go around killing ladies. I was wrong. It has a very captivating plot. A gang of thieves plan a robbery. They use an old woman’s house as their base, where they pretend to be musicians rehearsing for a performance. The old woman is an eccentric widow with a raucous parrot. The thieves think she will be a pushover, when she stumbles upon their plan. Instead, she finds herself part of the gang, to her horror.

A Shot in the Dark (1964) This is arguably the best of The Pink Panther series. I loved it more than The Pink Panther itself. Like all good comedies, the plot has a very fast pace, and like all good mysteries, it has a lot of twists and turns. I totally loved the scene in the nudist colony! Sellers gives a more interesting portrayal of the bungling French detective, Inspector Jacques Clouseau. Though I’ve come to respect him as an actor, I found it disturbing that in this film, he forced the producers to fire one director, and then he did not get along well with the replacement director. They even stopped talking to each other. I don’t like it when actors become too big for the director, however good the actor is. He should have directed the film himself.

The Mouse That Roared (1959) The premise of this film is a weird one. A small country, smaller than even Uganda, invades the United States, and wins the war. I’ve fantasised about such a thing happening in real life, and i’ve had delusions of being a general who leads the war against the US. After all the trouble they have caused in the world, it would be nice to have someone whack them (not some cowardly terrorists, but a real army to go there and kick ass and put some sense into them). In this way, this film was kind of prophetic, for many people around the world would love to the downfall of a big bully. Sellers played three roles, he was the elderly queen, the ambitious Prime Minister and the innocent, clumsy farm boy who leads the invasion. The film is packed with humour, I laughed every five minutes or so. But it’s also very entertaining. I’m yet to see an idiotic film that captures my attention the way this one did.

There are other good ones, like Dr. Strangelove, in which he played four roles, but I did not like. Maybe because it only appeals to the cold-war era. The Mouse That Roared is also based in that era, when nuclear weapons threatened the world, but its premise (attacking a bully, the US, and using war as a tool of profit) speaks to our generation as well, and will continue to be relevant long after nuclear politics are gone. He was also in Lolita, which I did not like much, maybe because the book was better, and the girl in the film did not look like an under-aged girl. The Pink Panther, which I didn’t enjoy as much as I enjoyed the ensuing one. I loved What’s New Pussycat, in which he appeared with Woody Allen, but well it wasn’t the best of Woody’s films.

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It's been an exciting year for me, as a writer. I got shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and then longlisted for the Short Story Day Africa. I've heard two books out in print, and two short stories to appear in anthologies, one is already out, the other coming in December. Busy, busy year, and I expect next year will be even busier. Which unfortunately might mean less blogging :((
So here are the books. They went up on amazon at nearly the same time, the first being in September and two this month.

The Terminal Move. A novelette, written in a genre I loved so much as a boy, and which I still think is my niche. It's basically a zombie tale, but set in Africa from way back in time, before the nations as we know them today were formed. Which makes it a fantasy as well. Take a peak at an interview I did for the publisher here.

And here is the blurb for the novelette.

For years the Jolabong people have wandered across the world, looking for a new home. Torn apart by war and famine, they have all but given up. But it is in the fiery motivation of Laceng, a rebellious youth of the tribe, that the delicate future of the Jolabong is poised. Together with his band of insurgents, Laceng marches into a valley of plenty - but what he finds there is worse than any threat his tribe has ever faced.
***
In this gripping tale of death, life and reins of power, Dilman Dila delivers a narrative reminiscent of the ancient oral traditions of Africa. A Commonwealth Short Story 2013 shortlisted author, Dila delivers yet again in the poignant and exquisitely crafted THE TERMINAL MOVE.

Cranes Crest at Sunset.
I surprised myself with writing this one. It was an experiment in romance. I'd never written in that genre before, but shortly after returning from Nepal, with my head still full of the love stories that I had gathered while making my first feature documentary, Untouchable Love, and with my heart growing fond of a Filipino bombshell, I just had to write a love story. Shortly after I finished it, I saw a call for manuscripts from a Kenyan publisher. They want to start an East African version of Mills and Boon. I submitted, wondering if my little story would fit their criteria, and it surprisingly did. So here it is, available on kindle.

The blurb.
Kabita, a beautiful Nepali doctor escapes from an arranged marriage to serve in a remote village in rural Uganda. In this village, she hopes to put to rest the haunting memories of her forbidden love and shattered past. But the peace she so desperately seeks seems elusive now, as she finds herself falling in love with Steven, a handsome African herdsman. Is she foolish to reject the advances of a fellow doctor for an idle herdsman painter? And is Steven really what he seems to be? Should she follow her heart or mind? Will Kabita finally find joy or will her dreams be shattered again? This is an intense love story set in rural Uganda

The third is in a collection of short stories, called the African Roar 2013. It's another horror fantasy story, about a puppeteer I used to know in my hometown when I was a little kid. Not that the puppeteer was evil. He was a great guy, but my childhood imagination fed me all sorts of crap about him, and when I became a writer I just had to write that story. We used to hear all sorts of stuff concerning the guy, he was a mystery, no one knew where he came from and some people claimed he walked from Kinshasha to Mombasa dragging his cart, staging shows. Such urban legend stuff became the spine of this story. The Puppets of Maramudhu. I should write more about him later.

Well, so here they are, three stories from Uganda, from some of the finest publishers in Africa today. It's not often that you find Ugandan fiction on Amazon, and I've heard of many foreigners in the country looking for something Ugandan to read, and not finding anything. This should be a start. Hopefully many other Ugandan writers will pick tips and have their works put up on Amazon.

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I never knew how much we remember from childhood until I wrote this story, The Puppets of Maramudhu. One reviewer, when talking about it, said “Dilman's story is unique, not that it is alien or experimental. It is neither of these. In fact, it is the kind of stories we love to tell, orally, but which we rarely ever write, unfortunately, perhaps because of our quest to remain realists.”Read the review here. I always wonder why we endeavour to remain realists, yet our socialisation process conditions us to believe in the supernatural, to point at spirits and unknowable forces when explaining strange phenomenon. As children, the stories we loved to hear the most were those with magic in them. Why is it that as adults we shy away from them?

Razor Blade, a street child rapper, and his audience.

Even if we didn’t have such a socialisation process, in the name of religion or science, it is hardwired in our systems to believe in a world that we cannot see, a world with powers we cannot explain, simply because we have never figured out what happens when we die. I became fascinated with this world at an early age, like every child, but I think I have not outgrown it. The characters I met back then still haunt my dreams, and every now and then they creep out into my stories. These characters were so weird that they furnished our childhood fancies with wild imaginations.

I think every child will come across a story of a real-life person who resurrected from the dead, long before they ever encounter Lazarus. It is the same with folk tales, for you will find narratives in an African society that are similar to those of a South American society that it has not had known contact with. These similarities often arise because all human beings share the same fears and emotions. If you look into your past, into your childhood, you will remember hearing about a person, maybe who lived down the street, or in the next village, or in another town, often someone you know, who will become a bogeyman of sorts, and you will remember that such a person once died and resurrected.

In my town, we had such a guy. They say he was buried for three days (why three days, like Jesus?), and one time a group of children were picking mangoes from a tree near the public graveyard when they heard something knocking under the ground. They fled. The knocking did not stop for several hours, until a few brave men dug up the grave and found the man alive. We called him Bubu (or was it Abubuna), which was not a polite word, for it mean deafmute. He could not speak, could not hear, for it is said what he saw in the world of the dead had to remain a secret. It’s probably because of him that I’m always fascinated with the living dead, like the jothokwo in The Terminal Move, and like Maramudhu in The Puppets of Maramudhu.

We would follow Bubu around the streets, trying to make him speak, and often he would ignore us. He was docile, non-violent, and I sometimes feel bad for pestering him. We used to follow ‘mad people’ around as well. I say 'mad people' in quotes because it is not the politically correct term to refer to people with mental disorders. I think most of these people were schizophrenic. They offered us a daily dose of entertainment, with their oddities. We followed them to eaves drop on the conversations they were having with the imaginary creatures bothering them, but often we followed them to provoke them into a fight.

I especially remember one woman, I forget what we used to call her. She had made a home in the disused stands at the bus park. We loved to throw stones at her for she was particularly fierce, and would throw missiles at us in return. One day, she did not fight back. She ran, fleeing our missiles. But then, she stopped and, even as stones fell all around her, she dumped a huge pile of poop right in the middle of the road. Not a stone hit her. The moment we realised she was pooing, we stopped stoning her and watched in excitement.

After she had eased, she resumed running away, though we were no longer chasing or stoning her. We crept to her poop. It had a variety of colors, almost like a rainbow. I had never seen such colourful poop, and never have. We were so enthralled by her poop that we kept watch over it for a whole day, until it decayed and lost its brilliance. For a moment, we thought the poop had magical powers. We wanted to scoop it up and keep it somewhere safe, where we would discover what powers it had and – well, I don’t remember what stopped us.

A Street Child Rapper Entertaining Women in Kampala

An Acrobat Entertaining in Kyaliwajala town, Namugongo, near Kampala.

While we tortured these poor fellows for our entertainment, every once in a while a real entertainer would drop into town. Being a small, almost ghost-like town, unlike a city, these street traders would not attract much money, or stay for long. Most would hang around for a day, or just a few hours. But some kept coming back, every few months or so, on their way through. There were dikulas, clowns who dressed like women and told silly jokes (dikulas have made it into another story, a novel, if it gets published, you will be reading a lot more about them, but they sure aren’t like the evil clown in Steven King’s IT), acrobats, musicians, dancers, and puppeteers. (I wonder how children these days entertain themselves. They seem to have a lot more (TVs, Internet, video games) competing for their attention.)

There was even once a man who came with a TV show. This was the 1980s, a time when the TV set was a mystery to many of us. Our family got its first TV set in 1990, because that is also the year the world cup was broadcast live to Uganda (I think), but we got the bonus of watching the Gulf War live as well. It was a black and white thing, and when the pictures when totally fuzzy, we sat and watched anyway for nobody knew how to get a clear signal. So when this guy came to town and said he had a TV show, a small crowd gathered. It turned out that he had only a set of still photos, which he hid inside a big black box, and he only allowed you to look at these photos through a pair of eye-holes. He did not make much money, once people figured out he was a big con. We thought we were going to see moving pictures, not a slideshow. His box show ended up in The Puppets of Maramudhu, as the cart the evil sorcerer dragged around.

What this documentary I made, about a family of street musicians

The puppeteer who stuck to my head, and who eventually become the title character in the story, Maramudhu, was Abe Mukibuga (I think that was his name). Or I might be confusing him with another one. Maybe there were two puppeteers, I cannot remember well, but I remember the song they used to sing, as they made their puppets to dance. It went 'mayo ni mayo, mayo ni wempe' (whatever those words mean) and then another line 'sasa wewe kijana moses, shika bibi yako', one of the puppets was called Moses, and he had a female partner with whom he danced. Well, this song ended up in the story as well, not the same lyrics though, but the same tune. I wish I could make a film out of it, to preserve this song that has never left my dreams.

The stories behind Mukibuga (that should mean town-man, or an urbanised man) were weird, as well. Nobody knew where he came from, even though he used a show name from Buganda. Nobody knew his age. He seemed to be the same age for decades, from the seventies when he started to pass by the town, to the late eighties when I first saw him. They said he never traveled in vehicles, that he pulled his cart on foot, from Kinshansha to Mombasa, staging shows from town to town. This particular detail impressed me so much that I had to write a story about him.I feel guilty for making him an evil man, but I guess I was only trying to make the dreams go away.

I feel I have not exhausted the story, of a showman who walks across the continent entertaining people. I think he will come again, sometime in the future, and maybe this time he will not be evil.

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She got married so I guess it's okay for me to write about this, though I'll still not say her real name. I saw a status update on facebook, and I know she is married. Nepali girls wouldn't write such a status, or else it hurts their honor.

A couple on a date in Thamel, Kathmandu. Lama's Cafe.

I first saw her early in 2010, must have been March, for the winter had just ended, and I had just moved from Kathmandu into Dhanghadi, the small town in the far west of Nepal where I was to stay for the next two years. I still loved watching football back then, and wouldn't miss a weekend match for anything. (Now, I don't even know what a ball looks like!) So I went to a cable company to subscribe, and I saw her at the reception. She had large eyes, a little unusual for a Nepali girl, and long eyelashes, which weren't fake. I was still single at that time, so you ladies should not think I am a macho-monster, but I was just beginning research into this Untouchable Love documentary. I was clueless about the dating habits of Nepalis. I had read a bit about it, but I thought I would learn more if I actually dated a Nepali girl.

Now, at that time, I had already received a fare share of marriage proposals, being a foreigner, some parents wanted to arrange for me to marry their daughters, or some boys offered me their sisters, and I even got a girl who offered me her mother. But when I saw this girl (let's call her Argantuk), I thought to myself, 'Wow, if they offer her to me, I won't refuse!'

She seemed to take an instant liking to me as well. Oh well, she didn't. It's just because she had probably never met an African in person, and was excited by it. The first question she asked me when I walked into their office was "Have you eaten rice?" I frowned. It was hardly eleven am, and I could not understand why she was asking me if I had eaten. At that time, I was still adjusting to the fact that Nepalis eat lunch at about 10am, and breakfast (or a snack) at 1pm. All through my two years there, I never got used to it, and I would go to a restaurant at about 1pm and ask for lunch, and they would tell me they only have breakfast. Well, so this girl asks me, "Have you eaten rice?", and at that time, I didn't know it was a form of greeting. Instead of, a "Hello", or maybe "How is your morning?" they go "Have you eaten?" And my innocent reply was, "No, I haven't eaten. But if you cook for me, I'll eat."

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In broken Nepali. I wasn't fluent yet at that time. But she was thrilled that I could speak her language, and it probably helped my intentions as well, for she at once offered to come to my dera to cook for me. Being shy, I balked. Her boldness surprised me. I had yet to learn that Nepali girls did not beat around the bush. If they want to cook for you for the rest of their life, they will tell you so, even if they do not yet know your name. So we got talking, for about thirty minutes, and at the end of it, she agreed to go out with me for tea.

A rickshaw puller taking a rest.

Danghadi main street during rush hour.

A date. So easily! I begun to think that Nepal is indeed a man's heaven. (Honest man seeking marriage, not randy one-night-standers :-o) I couldn't understand why so many men in their thirties were still unmarried. It was a Sunday, the first working day of the week. I suggested we have tea on, Monday, but she said no. She had to go to school. She was at a local university. Well, then I said Tuesday, and she told me outright, Tuesday is a bad day to visit, especially if it is for the first time. (I later learnt that a married woman cannot visit her parents on Tuesday, or if she has been staying at her parent's, she cannot go back to her husband on a Tuesday.) It was a bad luck day to have a first date, thus we settled for Wednesday.

The time came. 4pm. I took a rickshaw from my dera in Hasanpur 5, but i did not know where we were going. I called her, and she tried to tell me over the phone, but I could not understand her directions. I asked, is it Shalom Restuarant? It was a favorite of mine, near Raato Phul (Red Bridge). 'No' she said. 'Give the rickshaw driver the phone.' She then instructed him on where to take me.

We rode. We passed Raato Phul, and for a moment I thought we were going to Bells Cafe, which after Hotel Devotee was the classiest cafe in town. It served Chinese, Japanese and Indian dishes, alongside Nepali dishes. It was pricey as hell, but airconditioned. I thought it would be a nice spot for a first date. We did not stop there. We continued, and I thought we were going to the next best place, something on a rooftop with gold fish in a tank. I forget it's name. It has 'garden' in it though, and was opposite Nabil Bank. Will look it up. But we stopped before we reached there. The rickshaw man pointed out a shop to me. And the first sign that it was going to be a bad date struck me. A shop? A hardware shop?

A waiter in Shalom Restuarant, Danghadi, shows off
her mehendi. Superstition has it that the darker it heena
the more your husband loves (or will love) you.

Maybe, I thought, it's just a first stop, a meeting place, before we go to a real restaurant, a cozy cafe somewhere for that nice cup of Nepali tea. I walk into the restaurant and there she is, petit, large eyes, smiling brilliantly, in spite of the dust from cement. Her uncle sat next to her. He welcomed me, offered me a sit, and all the while I thought we would just say hellos and get going. Then the uncle asked a boy to bring us tea. A twelve year old boy. He came with tea in small glasses.

Is this it? I asked myself. A date in a hardware shop? Amid metals and bags of cement and all sorts of plumbing material? That was not the worst bit. There were about six workers in the shop. They all crowded around us, staring at me in excitement, waiting to listen to whatever we were going to talk about.

Her uncle then told me, "Why are you not talking? Tell her things!"

With six people listening? I didn't even know what 'things', he was talking about, but it sure wasn't the small talk on Uganda, and the weather in Uganda, that they wanted to hear about. When the Uncle said this, everyone fell silent, waiting for my next words.

"He is shy," the girl said. "You know foreigners don't like talking in people."

"Okay okay," the uncle said. "I'll take you upstairs."

Add caption

'Upstairs' was an unfinished floor above the shop. The dust made me cough. We sat on dusty crates, and I thought the uncle would now leave us alone, but he walked about, pretending to do clean up the place, while his ears were tuned to the conversation we were having. I don't even remember anymore what we talked about. I don't think I remembered anything soon after I left that hardware shop. I sure did not say the 'things' the uncle expected me to tell her.

Still, I must impressed the girl, or rather she was determined to cook for me for the rest of her life. She asked to come to my dera the next day! She did come, but I'm going to save that story until the next post. I have to sleep now. Be sure to return to read it.

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This blog post is an example of why some people should not be allowed to write blogs without supervision.....

Photo pirated from facebook, don't know who to credit

So I'm sitting here, looking at this blank page, and wondering what I can write to make you, my dear Chewy, laugh. Maybe I should put some of the pictures I saw on facebook last week, like the one with the tattoo. But that picture gave me nightmares, so I wonder if you should really see it. I dreamt that I was in China, and this woman with a magic pen was writing on my back. When she finished, I started to grow feathers, and then wings sprouted out of my back, and I turned into a giant cock --

Ah. Not the cock of porn films. But a real rooster, and every time I tried to speak, the only sounds I could make was something like coo-ko-lilo-koko! And then there was this Chinese girl laughing at me, and telling her friends, "Hey. When did you ever see a village rooster crowing in a town?" That is supposed to be a Swahili proverb. I was so pissed with her for speaking Swahili in Chinese - whatever that means, in the dream, it was so real - that I turned my rear end on her and let out a bucket of diarrhoea right onto her face!

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Stupid dream. But it isn't as stupid as the one you had, of a Japanese ghost. The geisha in a blue dress. I think she came into my dreams too. She was rowing a boat made out of feather -- what are feather doing in my dreams! - and she had a face as white as cassava flour. I was sitting with you on the beach, watching the sunset, and at first we thought she was a swan swimming through the lake at sunset. But when she got close enough, we saw what she was. And she leapt off the boat and flew at us ---

And we ran further down the beach until we found a group of people dancing naked around a fire, in the beams of the full moon, we stripped and joined them and we danced to the music of a guitar. Only that it turned out they were all dead people --

I think you can guess how bored I am right now. That I'm suffering from what some fools call a writer's block -- I don't think it's that at all. I'm just tired. Tired of making applications. Been making them all week long. Whew, let me go cook some chicken then I'll see how to make this a blog post worth reading.

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I have no words. I once read this story in the New Vision, and I heard a call to make a social action documentary, about how the government of Uganda ignores certain diseases, and focuses on diseases that donors say it should focus on. They pour money into TB, AIDS, Malaria, and now on maternal health - and yet being pregnant is not even a disease! It's 100% natural, but (okay, that's for another story) - there are sicknesses that are killing Ugandans, and no one is doing anything about it. Like DMD, duchenne muscular dystrophy, a terrible killer.

It's sad to see a young life wasted,
reduced to waiting for the grim reaper.

I visited this family in Wakiso district, and spent a day with them. I am hoping to convince a physiotherapist to visit the family and train them on how to care for their sick children, but this case makes me speechless. I do not know if I have the heart to make this film.

Three children have already died in the family. One boy is suffering from advanced stages of the disease. He may go any time soon. The other three boys are still young, but already showing signs of the killer.

What does the future hold for me? Julius seems to ask.

It is a very depressing story. Of little boys waiting to day. Of a family living in abject poverty. Of disease and hopelessness. Of a family that has been abandoned by neighbours, relatives and friends because they are thought to be carrying a curse.

I feel helpless.

And I feel gagged.

It doesn't look good at all, Julius seems to say.

There is a very bad attitude going round in the media. It has corrupted artists, writers and film makers. They say you should avoid the kind of stories that BBC and CNN tell about Africa. Stories that stereotype Africa as a place of wars, poverty and disease. The Caine Prize was once heavily criticized for picking stories that some say depict Africa in a 'negative' way. Some call it 'poverty porn'. It bowed to that pressure. Sadly.

But it makes me angry. And I want to ask these stupid people who want us not to tell stories of people like Paul Kayonga and is unfortunate family. I want to ask them one question; If we all keep silent, if we only write about the partying in Kampala, and crazy sex in night clubs like in Viva Riva, and how Africa has a lifestyle and atmosphere that is similar to the good life in Europe and America and Asia -- if we do not speak about the poverty, the wars, the diseases like duchenne muscular dystrophy that attacks unfortunately families and pushes them deeper into poverty, is that not escapism?

Who will speak for such people? Who will tell the stories to inspire social action? Shall we not end up like the USA, a capitalist hell where only the rich have a voice? Where only those who have means can be heard?

I think those who do not want to 'stereotype' Africa, and want to only tell stories of the 'good' side of Africa, have lived in Europe and America, or grown up in cities, and are out of touch with reality.

I want to tell this story. I think that portraying people in a positive light does not mean avoiding 'poverty porn'. Instead, it involves painting a picture of how brave such families are. Of how surviving against all odds.

I hope I will be able to tell this story. Please God, give me the strength to tell it.

All smiles upon getting beans from a good neighbour. Now supper is assured.

Mother and her children prepare beans for supper.

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This weekend, I returned from Mombasa, where I spent nearly two weeks on holiday with the girlfriend. Ooops – fiancée. We had planned for it for a long time, and she did not know I was planning to pop the question in style during this holiday. Upon returning, a friend called and said I must have spent millions. I laughed, because we each hardly spent 300 dollars for the entire trip! We would have spent less if had avoided first class on the train!

I know, you are skeptical. But let me give you a few tips. You can have a five day holiday in Mombasa for only five hundred thousand shillings. That is the kind of money some Ugandans blow in the fake beaches around Lake Victoria. Some even blow it in bars. But next time you want to take out your girlfriend, try Mombasa. It’s cheap, if you follow these simple tips I’m going to give you.

I like to travel, to see the world, to experience new cultures and new adventures. I’ve thus figured out the cheapest ways to enjoy the most exotic spots in the world as though I’m a rich person.

Needlessly to say, take the bus, not a plane. And certainly avoid first class on the train! The bigger and more comfortable buses no longer make the Kampala-Mombasa trip. They only go up to Nairobi. There is only one company that we found has buses going all the way to the coat. This was Mash Poa, a pretty cool and comfy bus. Still, you’ll have to take a bus to Nairobi, and then change to another one that goes to Mombasa.

Luxury busses like Queens Coach cost about 70,000 and 12-14 hours from Kampala to Nairobi. It was very comfortable. They gave us free snacks. The only problem was there was no toilet break between Busia and Nakuru! You can get to Nairobi for less than 70k, however. Take a taxi to Busia or Malaba, it costs only 15,000. Cross the border. Take a bus from the Kenyan side to Nairobi and you’ll pay between 1,000 KES (about 30,000) and 1,350 KES (about 40,000).

It's common to see game along the highways of Kenya

I am not sure about this, but I think there are buses that go from Busia/Malaba to Mombasa for about 1,500-2,000 KES. We saw these buses and those rates while in Mombasa, but we already had other plans for the return trip.

The one advantage travelling by bus has over flying is not just because you save lots of money. The highways pass through game parks, and so instead of paying hundreds of dollars on safaris, just take a bus. Sooner or later, you’ll see game. Lots of game. Zebras. Giraffes. Buffalos. Elephants – Reiza was so thrilled to see the red elephants of Tsavo that she squealed and screamed at me to take the photos – The experience was better on the train.

Do not spend the night or a lot of time in Nairobi. It will only eat into your budget. There are many buses that go to Mombasa and it is possible to get one every hour. The cheapest will cost you only 1,000 KES (about 30,000). It takes about seven hours. But be sure to time your trip so you do not arrive in Mombasa during the evening rush hour. It was the worst jam I ever experienced. We were stuck in it for about two hours. And it was made much worse because we had been traveling for nearly 24hours, we had not had a toilet break in nearly 3hours and my bladder was bursting.

The train leaves Nairobi for Mombasa on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. You can take this as well, and if you avoid first class and take economy class, which goes for only about 600 KES (about 18,000 Ugandan), you’ll see that you save almost 20,000. And you’ll see more animals because the train passes deeper into the parks than the buses do.

Once in Mombasa, you will worry about where to sleep. You of course do not want to go to a hotel or guest house where you will be robbed. The seedy kind that adulterers prefer. But good accommodation can be very expensive. And those closes to the beaches are beyond your reach. Unless you find a backpacker’s place. You can stay right on the beach, in a dorm, for as little as 800 KES a night. (That’s about 10 US dollars or 25,000 UGX).

A resident of Backpacker's Nirvana

We stayed at Backpackers Nirvana, which is right on Nyali beach, and it was worth the price because we were allowed to cook food for ourselves. If you are a budget traveler, then cooking facilities come in very handy because you won’t have to spend a lot of money eating in restaurants. At Backpackers Nirvana, you can get a private room for about 3,000 KES a night. These rooms can host up to three people because the beds are really huge, so if you are traveling in a group and do not want to share a dorm with strangers, this might be the cheap option.

Even cheaper and free, is Couch surfing. There is this website http://www.couchsurfing.org/ where you can find someone to host you for free in Mombasa. We put out a request and we got a lot of people offering us free accommodation in their homes. But we chose to stay at Nirvana because of it's proximity to the beach. We wanted to be able to go to the ocean at any time of the day. It was worth it. We spent a few dawns taking a swim in the ocean as the sun rose out of the waters. Absolutely marvelous!

Now, if you make the calculations, you realize you need about 180,000 UGX for transport alone, and about 125,000 for bedding. That leaves you with 195,000 for food, entry tickets to the popular tourist sites and fun. I’d suggest you avoid the tourist sites that are not unique to Mombasa – that you can find elsewhere, even here in Uganda. The entry fees are very expensive and will eat deep into your pocket. The only two places I would recommend are Fort Jesus and the Marine park, where you can snorkel and see the bottom of the sea. Do not go to Haller park – though it is a nice place and offers a very exciting and fulfilling experience. It is a very expensive zoo in a reclaimed quarry, and yet it doesn’t even have that many animals. You can always see those same animals along the highways.

Fort Jesus charges foreigners an entry fee of 800 KES (about 10 USD), and 400 KES for Kenyans. I paid the Kenyan rate, because I speak fluent Swahili. They do not ask for IDs, so as long as you know Kiswahili, you’ll get away with the deception. And when you go to the Marine Park, you’ll see how much you can save if you passed off as a Kenyan. Foreigners pay 1,300 (about 15 US dollars) while Kenyans pay on 100 KES! It makes me wonder if foreigners are supposed to have bigger eyes than Kenyans and so have to pay more for seeing the same crappy animals that the Kenyans will see. For the marine park, you’ll need to cough about 1,000 KES for a boat to sail in. The rate is the same, whether you want the boat for the whole day, or for just a few minutes. There are two kinds of boats, the glass boat with engines, and the angalawa (sic), which I preferred for it is indigenous and gives you a more exotic and romantic experience, especially if you take Wagna’s boat. You can find him through Backpacker’s Nirvana. I thought the boat was called a dhow, but Wagna said it is called angalawa, I hope that is the correct spelling. It sounded like that.

So if I am limiting you to only Fort Jesus (one day) and the Marine Park plus snorkeling (one day) what will you do for the other three days? Seeing that you have only slightly over 100,000 left for you to spend? Go to the beach!

There's lots of fun you can have at the beach. Play soccer. Swim. Float. Just ogle. If you are the clubbing and partying type, go to Mtwapa, the sin city of Kenya, and you could dance right by the water's edge. Or you could easily pick a girl - or a man - for the night!

Mombasa has many beaches that you can play in all day. There’s Nyali beach, which is closest to Backpackers Nirvana, and probably the best of those near Mombasa. But there are also beaches in Mtwapa and in Kilifi. I especially loved Bofa beach in Kilifi because we had it all to ourselves. It was so isolated that it gave me enough courage to perform a little “Will you marry me” drama right by the seaside without onlookers spoiling it with their bewildered eyes.

Kilifi is about an hour away from Mombasa by matatu, which cost us about 150 KES. While in Mombasa on a budget, avoid the tuktuks and the taxis. They will drain your pocket. Mombasa’s matatu service is very friendly, and it’s easy to get to wherever you want to go because all matatus are labeled with their routes. In our hotel, there were two girls who stayed in the dorm, paying only 10 USD for accommodation. But they were spending about 40 USD daily on tuktuks and taxis. It did not make sense to me. They might have spent less than 5 US dollars daily if they learnt how to use the matutus, or walked.

Captain Wagna leads a client to his boat

Then, you need to eat sea foods. Avoid the restaurants. They will overcharge you. I was surprised, for I thought that being by the ocean, sea foods would be a lot cheaper in Mombasa. But the prices were murder. We thought we would not taste anything until one of these beach boys, Julius, promised to get us anything we wanted. He got us all kinds of fish and crab and lobster, at give away prices, for he knew some fishermen, and we cooked it ourselves and enjoyed the meals for a tenth of the prices we would have paid in Golden Sticks. We later realized we might have gone to one of the fish markets and bought the sea foods ourselves.

Well, so there it is. Your five day holiday in Mombasa for only five hundred thousand shillings. It’s doable. Better start saving. The best way to have fun is not by buying stupidly expensive tickets to watch drunk musicians in Lugogo. Nor is it by going to Kabira country club or to Steak Out and getting drunk. Jump on the bus, leave the country and you’ll discover a whole new world that you hitherto thought was reserved for the rich!

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Anyone who travels a lot will come across a certain kind of people, who are both a curse and a blessing. They call themselves guides and fixers, and they claim to exist to help tourists and visitors find their ways around a place. Or know more about a site. True, some tourists cannot do without them. But if you are a backpacker, the last thing you want to do is share your little money with a hustler who will give you information that you can anyway get off the internet, or off some guide book.

I know, they are just trying to make ends meet, but because it’s an easy job (you do not need qualifications, nor do you have to invest any money to be a ‘guide’, you only have to idle at a popular tourist spot like a vulture in a death zone), there’s often ten of them for every tourist. That makes them a big pain. They are not the official guides with the registered tour companies, though those can also be so irksome – remember when you switched off your TV because every channel you tuned to had a Coke commercial? Well, these guides are like a million boring commercials waiting for you when you go out to relax, enjoy a photo shoot, admire the ruined architecture, where you go to have fun.

I first encountered one at Bashantapur Durbar Sqaure, inKathmandu. He could not take no for an answer. First, he wanted to sell us pictures of the Kumari, the child goddess who lives in one of the houses in the square. We told him we are Christians, and he retorted with a ‘What are you then doing in a Hindu temple?’

It’s totally free and unrestricted to enter the Kumari’s courtyard, but the first thing this guy tells me is this, ‘Today is a special festival. I can take you in to see her.’ I almost fell for it. Yet, I did not see any police or guard standing at the doorway. So we shrugged him off and went in, where we found a group waiting for the Kumari to show her face. After about thirty minutes, she showed in one of the windows for a few seconds. We could not take photos because it is prohibited. Strangely, there were thousands of her photos being sold all over the square.

Entrance to the Kumari's courtyard.
The 'guides' who will hustle you idle about.

The Kumari's courtyard

When we got out, the gentleman was waiting for us. We still said no. And the harassment started. He insisted that we use his services, because we were in the square and needed a guide. We just wanted to take photos and we could find our way around. He followed us wherever we went, chanting “I’m a guide I’m really cheap” over and over again like a toy robot. Then, he started to offer us information on whatever we were seeing – “They used to decapitate people on this stone.” – But that is when it turned into an argument. A quarrel. I called him a liar and that made him very angry.

Maybe what he said is true, but there was a guide pamphlet about the square, and I did not remember seeing that kind of information. I know these fellows will cook up anything to get your attention. When we were in Fort Jesus, Mombasa, one scared us into hiring him.

Fort Jesus, Mombasa, with it's irritating hustlers and guides lurking at the entrance.

We wanted to walk around the Old Town (it was not worth it, it is not even an old town. Do not bother to walk around it. There is no wow factor) but we did not know this. We trusted what the stupid guide books said. So we thought it would be an interesting thing to do. We tried to ask for directions, but even that was for sale. None of them could show you the way to the toilet unless he offered to ‘guide’ you there, for a fee. This guy, he called himself Muhammad Ali, scared us with talk of muggers who would rob us if we had no guide, so we let him ‘guide’ us.

But he was only after the money, and getting over the tour so quickly. He walked at such a fast pace that we fought to keep up with him, and even now I cannot imagine why we did not ditch him immediately. He frequently took us to craft shops which he obviously had connections to, and tried to talk us into buying stuff from there. The walk around Old Town might have been nicer without him. We should have taken a map of some kind with us. It seemed perfectly safe to walk about without a guide.

When we got to Fort Jesus, another hustler tried to take us around. He tried to lead us away from the official ticket booth – I figured they have a scam going, where you can get in without paying the official entry fee, and that is why this guy did not want us to go straight to the ticket office. We ignored him. But once inside, he kept on our tails, very much like the Nepali man in Bashantapur. He was so insistent that he got angry when we ignored him. Only after I used foul language did he bugger off.

The one thing that made Nyali beach not as interesting as it might have been were the beach boys. Like the guides at the historical sites we went to, they try to make a living from the hundreds of visitors who come to have fun by the waterside. But in their quest for money, they turn into a nuisance. Even while we were swimming (or in my case trying to swim) they would walk into the water and try to get us interested in buying their stuff (sea shells, sea foods, etc) or to get us to go snorkeling with them, or to make for us crafts with our names on it. We could hardly enjoy the water in peace. There was one, however, who seemed like a nice fellow. He was called Julius, and I will write about him later.

Julius, the beach boy of Nyali

So when we got to Bofa beach in Kilifi, and found it totally isolated, not a soul in site, we were thrilled. At least we would have some fun. Unfortunately, the tide was so high and the water so rough for amateur swimmers like us to go into it. It would have been nice for surfing though. So we sat on the sand and enjoyed the music of water crashing onto the shore. Just when we thought we would get away with making love there, two young boys appeared. They were about eleven years old. And they were selling shells. I guess someone had spied us coming in and so word went round that there were two visitors down in the beach waiting to be hustled.

The boys of Bofa beach, Kilifi

Still, these little boys were not aggressive like the folk at Nyali beach. They were shy, and gave us privacy when we told them we were not interested in their shells. This surprised me so much that I decided to buy a few shells from them.

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I met a Belgian in Nairobi early in the year, at a filmmaker’s workshop. When he went back to his country, he found a teaching job because, well, filmmaking isn’t as lucrative as our dreams would wish it to be. And since he had been to Africa, he started this project in his school, to teach these children about Africa and African cultures. They are I think in the age group of 10-12. So he asked these sweet angels to send questions to the African friends he met, and below are some of the questions. Some of them made me go ‘wtf!’ and others just made me fall off the floor laughing. (I wonder what the questions would be like if I picked a bunch of African school children and had them ask questions about Europe!)

So here are the innocent questions.

My name is Eira and I’m contacting you as a part of our school project on African cultures. I am going to be a giraffe attacking a person in our performance, so does African giraffes attack people?

I could not help laughing. The poor kid going to be a giraffe! Wow, I would love to be a giraffe as well, but it made me think, why do those teachers make children play out unrealistic roles? Giraffes are the gentlest creatures. They are afraid of people. Only people attack giraffes! And so giraffes are afraid of people. They won’t let you touch them.

I remember in Haler Park, Mombasa, I was feeding one of them. He (or she) ate a whole bag of food off my palms, passed his slimy, rough tongue all over my hand to lick off every bit of the food (whatever it was) and once he had eaten to his fill, I tried to pet him. But he jumped away with a ‘grrpphh!’ sound – it was an angry expulsion of air from his nostrils, as if warning me to keep feeding him but not to get so friendly.

My name is Fredrik. What are some very famous folk stories from Malawi or Kenya?
Thank you for your time, and I hope you have a great day

My name is Mathieu. What are some traditional dance moves and rhythms in Malawi? How often do you have a traditional dance? Is it somewhat like this one? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VYBErFOng8Do you believe in someone different than god?

This one made me frown. He starts out by asking questions about dance, and then all of a sudden, he pops that one about God. Hmmm. Do you believe in someone different than god? Wow. He probably should know that Europeans brought a certain God to Africa, but now the Europeans have largely abandoned this God. They only interact with him in Sunday school. Or they misinterpret his teachings whenever they want to use it to serve their political agendas. So while today this God would be against gay marriage, tomorrow he is the all loving being who promotes homosexuality.

Dear Elijah & Beaty,
My name is Eva and I’m contacting you as a part of our school project on African cultures.
Are you in a band, if so what instrument do you play? I have one more question to ask. Do you think my group and I should wear costumes?

Answer: Yeah, wear animal costumes. I think you will look cute as a Zebra. Oh well, we didn’t really send the kid that answer, it was something much nicer.

Dear Elijah & Beaty

Why do African dance? when they are happy or sad?

My name is Harper. I’m really glad to get to communicate with you! In our group, we’re doing Waka Waka by Shakira as a comparison from modern African influenced music and music that is straight from Africa. I was wondering if people in Africa think that African influenced modern music is interesting or stupid?

Nice question, Harper J

Modern African dance

My question is about our music. I have the feeling as if my group needs some new African rhythms to really improve and make the project really good. I think we use to much the same rhythm because we don’t have enough variety of rhythms. Therefore, could you please see our video (sent a link, but sorry, can’t post it here) and say how we could improve and could you send us some more rhythms?

Sure boy. Your rhythms are much the same and no matter how much you try to learn African rhythms, you may never get the moves. Unless you come and live here for many years.

School children perform a dance at the National Theatre, Kampala

Dear Elijah & Beaty. Is the danse and the music the same in all Africa??? What are your beliefs there?? Where do you leve ? What is your hobby? Do you have a wife ? Do you have kids ? What do you do in life???? What food do you eet and who do you eet ??
Thanks for your time,
alexandra


This is some of what we eat in Africa. Not what you see below.

Picture stolen from google images. Can't remember who to credit.

That last question made me cry. who do you eet ?? I can only think that he wanted to ask, who do you eat with? Iremember once meeting a guy from Papua New Guinea, and I asked him if he were a cannibal. Understandably, he never wanted to talk to me again. I guess we have a long way to go before we overcome stereotypes.

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It’s that time of the year, when you get a little down because you have no money to spend on a proper holiday. So a few weeks back, I tried my luck in online bingo and I won myself a few dollars to buy gifts and stuff for friends and family.

And it got me thinking about how much gambling is frowned upon in our societies. I remember, as a teenager, we used to go to a disused stadium in our little town, and play cards for money under the crumbling pavilion. The most popular game was matatu, which I think is played only in Uganda. Recently, someone developed a software and you can play it online via Google, without having to worry that askaris will pounce on you and drag you off to jail. In those days, as the gang gambled away their pennies, a couple of boys would be on the lookout. Being a football stadium, it was easy to see anyone entering from a mile off, and we knew the faces of the askaris from the Municipal Council, so it was easy to see danger long before it arrived, and we would flee to the safety of the surrounding bushes.

Parents used to warn us against cards. They would scream stuff like ‘Don’t play cards or else you will become a muyaye.’ Bayaye are brats, spoilt kids, petty thugs who roam the streets looking for a chance to pickpocket. But I loved the card game, and I especially loved the thrill of making and losing money by chance. I was often lucky, both in cards and other gambling activities. I remember playing the lottery game JADA Scratch for Cash a few times, and I often won something. Sadly, I’ve never hit the jackpot.

Why is it that cards got such a bad image? There were many ways to gamble. We sometimes would use bottle tops (a game called ‘peke’, where you dig a hole in a ground and stood several feet away. The one who threw in the most tops won). The prize would not be money always. Sometimes we gambled for mangoes, or books, or pens. When adults found us playing these other games, they would never yell at us to stop. Today, I see youth gambling through pool, Ludo – both of which have become so popular you find a gang of idle youth playing them on every street – and mweso. No one will frown when they see you playing such games, but the moment you are caught with cards, it’s a police case.

Youth playing pool by the roadside in a Kampala suburb

In Nepal, gambling is deeply ingrained in the culture, and playing cards is so popular that you find a deck in every office, especially those in rural towns. During tea breaks, or when there is no electricity, or at the slightest excuse, they will play a game of cards. It has become something of a religious ritual during the famous festival, Tihar, when families reunite in ancestral homes and when friends gather – it’s like Christmas, only that it is nearly a whole month of Christmas. A whole month of idleness, of festivities, of drinking, and of gambling. It is hard to think of Tihar without cards, just as you cannot separate Carols from Christmas.

They play the game anywhere. In offices, in living rooms, in temples, in dark rooms, on the rooftops, in the balconies. I always thought it made one of my favorite restaurants sexy, almost like a little illegal casino. This was Shalom, in Rato phul (red bridge), Danghadi town. It always had a haze of hookah smoke hanging above the tables like mist in a horror movie scene, and pretty Magar girls walking around like Chinese spies in a James Bond movie.

When the Moaist rebellion cropped up, they assumed the role of moral guardians of the society. They banned gambling, and thus playing cards, among other thing. They once attacked a village of hereditary prostitutes, Munha, and beat up the girls whose only crime was to be born in the caste of entertainers. Badi. Not many Nepalis liked this, for the Maoists were attacking the very foundations of their cultures, beliefs that they had held valuable for centuries.

Kathmandu nightlife. You get a feeling sometimes
that Nepalis aren't welcome in some places.

Maoists marching against something or the other.

Today, Nepalis are not allowed into Casinos. There are about half a dozen in Kathmandu, mostly based in five star hotels. I visited the Radisson, and was welcomed with pretty girls who made me feel like Sean Connery. I went with a Nepali friend, who loved to gamble, but who was afraid to go into the casinos alone. ‘If I’m with you,’ he told me, ‘they will think I’m a foreigner as well.’ He spoke heavily accented English, the kind Nepalis think are English yet is really Nepali English. So at the entrance, I did all the speaking. They let us in without trouble. However, Nepalis normally wouldn’t find it difficult to enter these casinos, for the casinos have to make money and will look away if a national walks in. But when the police raid the place, which they often do, they pounce on anyone who they think is a national and whisk him away to jail. But this friend knew if he was in the company of a foreigner, the police would not touch him. Indeed, in our night at the Radisson, he told the cops who interrogated him, ‘I’m merely his driver. He invited me in for a drink.’ The cops left him alone, and he won a tidy sum that night.

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A few years back, I used to have a certain kind of anger against foreigners who came to Uganda (and by extension other ‘poor’ countries) to make films. “Who gives them the right to tell our stories?” me and other filmmakers/artists would ask ourselves in our silly workshops. “They are only going to misrepresent us.” “They only tell negative stories that stereotype us in pictures of poverty, sickness and war.”

Then, I went to Nepal. It’s a story I’ve told over and over again and need not to repeat. When I told Nepalis about my intention, they asked; “You came all this way to tell that story?” Stories of inter-caste marriages are so commonplace. I could feel the bewilderment in the question mark.

A Newari bride. Did I have the right to tell her story?

Of course, I did not give them my actual motivation – that I was going through very bad times in my quest for a wife and was thus was searching for the meaning of love. They would have laughed at me. I gave them a more practical reason; human rights, that the film was my small contribution in the fight against caste-based oppression and racial discrimination.

This was not far from the truth, for while every artist has a personal motivation, which is often so stupid that they cannot mention it in public, he or she needs a practical and global reason to make a film. A motivation that will attract financing, for filmmaking is sadly not an art – not yet – it’s a very expensive hobby. It will only become art if, according to Jean-Luc Godard, the tools of making it become as cheap as pencil and paper.

Early last year, I attended the ESoDoc International workshop in Nairobi. I was surprised to find that two of the projects being pitched were based in Uganda. One had something to do with this new trend of voluntourism, which some refer to as poverty tours. The other was strangely very similar in theme to the one I made in Nepal. It involves illicit sex and love. It is about a group of women who were shipped off to an island called akampene, or Punishment Island, and abandoned there to die. Why? Because they got pregnant outside marriage.

One of these women, who I will call Martha (don’t ask me why), was very young when her uncle impregnated her. She tried to hide the pregnancy, but well, you cannot hide a balloon. Her brother got furious. He did not believe her story of incest, rape and defilement. He dragged her into a boat, rowed off to the island and abandoned her there. It is a very tiny island where nothing grows, so she was bound to starve to death. But she managed to escape. She killed the baby when she delivered it.

An artist's impression of the island.
Drawing by Comfort Abemigisha

Very sad story. Very dramatic. I would have loved to make this documentary. And when I asked Laura, the Italian filmmaker currently fundraising to make this film, why she was doing it, she gave me the global motivation. Women’s rights. (It is not surprising that her crew is almost entirely female.) In her own words, “…women discrimination is something that needs to be spoken out…The story of Akampene is one of the million stories of women in trouble around the world and it is so strong that it can address the issue effectively. In some places the difficulties in giving birth, raising and educating a child or just being a woman are often so huge and unbearable that they need to be discussed, as they raise important questions about the life of each of us.” For lack of space, she left out relating it to the life of thousands of girls in Uganda today, who end up with unwanted pregnancies, sometimes after someone close to them – an older relative, a teacher, a neighbor – lures them into sex. I do know for sure that it is part of her outreach plan.

But while she was telling us about her project, I could not help thinking at the back of my head “Oh no, not another foreigner coming to tell our story!” Yet, a bolt of lightning struck me. And I thought to myself – ‘Wait a minute. You were a foreigner in Nepal telling Nepali stories!’ I remember making some Nepalis mad with my blog posts, and my choice of topic. I got a few hate mail on facebook. And sitting there with Laura in that small dark café in Nairobi, drinking coffee, I came to realize that it does not matter who tells the story. What matters is the motivation.

So I started to dig in to get to the very bottom of what was driving her to travel all the way from Italy to a remote village in Uganda.

“I feel very attracted to the island,” Laura told me. “Deep inside I have always been an animist, not as much as a religion, but I have always related both to objects and places as if they had a soul. This probably started in my childhood. I was very shy, with a vivid imagination and lots of time spent by myself.”

She paused. I waited, using the best trick I have learnt while interviewing characters. Silence. A slight nod of encouragement. If you say anything, you might break their chain of thought, and I could see that Laura had something heavy in her. Fortunately, none of the other three people with us on that table said anything, for they too could feel she was on the verge of telling something from deep down in her heart. She took a long sip of the coffee, and then she said, in so soft a voice that I almost did not hear it.

“I grew up with my grannies…. My parents were divorced.” If it were a movie scene, I would have faded out every other sound in the café. Her face would have been sharply in focus, while the people in the background would be blurred to arty images. For she was struggling to tell what was driving her to make the film. I could not make sense of it, or join the dots from the divorce of her parents to pregnant women left in an island to die. I doubt that she could make sense of it as well, for sometimes the artist never really puts a finger on the thing compelling her to do what she is doing.

“When I had nightmares,” she went on, “my wardrobe would appear.” Oh oh, I thought, as I took a sip of the coffee, nightmares and wardrobes? But I kept silent, and she continued. “The wardrobe – it was the container of my darkest feelings. When I first saw the island, it worked for me as my wardrobe.”

Now I was slowly joining the dots. Parents divorced. Nightmares. Wardrobe. Island. It started to make some sense, until she said, “When I was much younger, I was in a violent relationship.”

She did not say anything more, and I did not press her, for the cameras were not rolling. She excused herself to go to the bathroom, and I knew she was going to cry. When she had gone, Philline, a German who was with us, said, “Why do you ask such things Dilman? Now look what you have done to her. You are so mean!”

I know I’m mean. I’m sorry I asked those questions. I did not know it would open a wound. But I simply had to know. Later on, when she was back in Italy, she sent me an email (don’t call me mean! I did not send her a questionnaire! She did it on her own volition), I think she wanted to say more, or to clarify what she tried to tell me in that small dark café in Nairobi. One line from that email prompted me to write this article. She said, “I am sure that what made me really put so much work into trying to make this film, is the wardrobe-island link, even if this may make sense only to me... But I was in that wardrobe before I was in a violent relationship.”

Well, good luck to you Laura. I cannot wait to see your film made. There is a strong undercurrent of emotion in the effort, and it’s such a force that results in masterpieces.